Equestria 1939 - Weird World War

by Georg

Rating: teen
Tags: Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Princess Cadance
Length: 35865

You’re probably wondering why Sherbert Lemon was stuck in an experimental submarine under the Manehattan harbor with an Equestrian spy on a secret mission. So was she.

In September of 1939, Germany and Russia invaded Poland, and the European war became inevitable.  Unlike the Great War where Equestria remained mostly neutral, this time there will be no safe harbor for the small nation of ponies.  While they quietly attempt to withdraw their citizens from the bonfire that is engulfing Europe, they are operating blind.  There is a fair chance their peacetime ally of Germany has already decided Equestria would make a good base for an attack on America, and just as likely the Americans will move to prevent it, resulting in the war arriving on Equestria’s shore regardless of any futile attempt at neutrality between the Great Powers.

Celestia has to do something to stop this disaster, or at least mitigate the destruction to save her little ponies from the ravages of war.  If only there were some way to read Germany’s mail so Equestria could remain one step ahead of them.  With Cadence on a last-ditch diplomatic mission to France and Celestia distracted by other affairs of state, the crushing responsibility falls on the thin shoulders of a young unicorn researcher and a reluctant spy.  Together, they will carry out a daring raid right into the underwater clutches of a German submarine and try to escape without getting caught or killed.

While on the moon, dark forces have begun to stir…

Art by Airy Words and a certain amount of AI and tweaking, but mostly Airy Words
Editing by Tek, Airy Words, and whoever finds the inevitable typo and politely reports it.
Credit to DC Comics and the 1970s series Weird War Tales, of which I have several in my basement collection.

Published 2024-09-06 12:40:03 UTC
Last updated 2024-09-16 12:20:56 UTC

1. Celestia's Gambit

Equestria 1939 - Weird World War
Celestia’s Gambit

You’re probably wondering why Sherbert Lemon was stuck in an experimental submarine under the Manehattan harbor with an Equestrian spy on a secret mission.

So was she.

It will make more sense if we go back a few weeks, to where it all began. It was her mother’s fault, after all. Even if she had been dead for over two years. Well, mostly dead.

Anyway…

“When all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted a sufficiently heavy star will collapse. Unless fission due to rotation, the radiation of mass, or the blowing off of mass by radiation, reduce the star's mass to the order of that of the sun, this contraction will continue indefinitely…”
— “On Continued Gravitational Contraction” by J. Oppenheimer and H. Snyder, September 1, 1939

Sherbert Lemon was crazy.

Not crazy in the kind of way that others wanted to take her to all the good parties, or even just going ‘tock’ when everypony else went ‘tick.’ No, she was crazy but just barely on the correct side of certifiably insane, much like every other core staff member of Q branch in Manehattan.

Of course, she knew that. She was not that crazy after all, just crazy in a way that could be turned to Equestrian society’s good use without endangering her own mental well-being more than absolutely necessary. And as long as she was just crazy, she could work on her projects. That gave her good incentive not to go insane. Plus, a great number of unicorns could be considered crazy by nature, so to not be crazy in one way or another would have been rather odd.

Now her mother, on the other hoof, had been just over the line of insane by a hair. If there had been an abandoned tower outside of Manehatten with the correct number of bats and a pipe organ in the basement, she would have purchased it in a heartbeat. Somepony else’s heart, of course. She had a jar on her desk, after all.

Admittedly, Dr. Vernier was a genius in addition to her relative insanity. Well, when compared to her relatives, of course. Where the rest of the Voltage family tree built elevators that went sideways or fruit-flavored wallpaper, Vernier was a surgeon who specialized in transplants. Mostly limbs, although there were a few organs in the mix. Also mostly volunteers, because it was amazing what somepony would be willing to risk in certain circumstances when the doctor only gives a few weeks to live.

Then one day, Dr. Vernier the Scientist became Madam Vernier the Wife, took a husband, and bore a child. Several months later, she just as abruptly turned the husband back into a solo act with a reasonable pension and good references which he used to marry again, with Madam Vernier as a bridlemaid.

Dr. Vernier returned to her research with a slightly less fanatical devotion to the advancement of science, somewhat on the order of a motorcar traveling down a mountain road instead of a steamroller, but her daughter was not neglected in the process. She was frequently seen in public acting completely normal at her mother’s side, and even took great pains to be a model sister when her remarried father produced a male child.

Years of child raising followed, with important members of the Manehattan scientific community quietly fretting as to what diabolical plan she was up to and wondering just why Sherbert J. Lemon acted so… normal.

If asked, under sufficient truth serum, Sherbert would have admitted she was constantly acting, from her first waking to slumber. She was a controlled experiment, after all. Contaminating the results with unreliable equine interactions would have been unthinkable. Her mother had been at the far far end of foalbirth age when Sherbert was born, and other than her brilliant half-brother Mixed State, there was little chance of adding another sufficiently intelligent young sibling into her life to share her scientific goals. Well, without some dramatic science.

So Sherbert Lemon studied at home, studied at school for a year at Oxford and Cambridge, and eventually studied at Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, all the while accumulating a collection of unexploded laboratories and research topics that might be worth future expansion. Left alone, she quite possibly would have followed in her mother’s scholarly hoofsteps and continued to make her scientific peer group nervous by honing her skills until it was time to produce another generation of experimentation.

Then came the accident.

Realize that no matter what odd directions a genius takes, random chance in a sufficiently large population will include several other geniuses pointed in generally the same direction, or able to be pointed by sufficient power. Since Princess Celestia had that kind of power and more, Vernier’s research group in Manehattan consisted of like-minded but thankfully duller minds, working their way to develop a cryonic suspension process for the crystallization of future space travelers and decrystallization at the destination, no matter how many years that could entail. Exact details were sketchy, but suffice it to say their experiment failed in a lethal manner, and Vernier’s will specified a quite unique method of disposing of the resulting corpse. Over a thousand photographs were taken of her brain, one microscopic slice at a time, until her mortal remains were pulverized and her dust spread out over the ocean.

If society could be said to have a metaphorical reality as a larger entity, the general scientific community held its collective breath and watched to see how Sherbert Lemon would react to the death of her mother, perhaps with a lightning-tower and a surgical laboratory in the basement.

Instead, she accepted her mother’s vacant position at the Manehattan Institute of Inadvisable and Improbable Question Research (Q branch) and began a project investigating lipid membranes instead.

After a few months, the scientific community turned its attention elsewhere, convinced that the fuse on the interesting firework had gone out. Sherbert did not realize she had received her job offer from the discreet agency inside the Equestrian government because of Princess Celestia. Despite ruling a country and dealing with international diplomacy, the princess had time to appreciate scientific papers that she could not understand and believed that it was only pragmatic to keep such sharp minds on the inside of the government pointing out, instead of on the outside trying to break in. In addition, research into binding proteins and amphipathic reactions to thaumic charges in silicon wafers was being encouraged as of late, due to similarly unrevealed desires from the top of the mountain in Canterlot.

The Manehattan lab floor Sherbert worked in had five researchers when she started, which soon became four by way of promotion, then three from anaphylactic shock due to exposure to lipid stabilization fluid in a thaumically active matrix when one of her fellow researchers took a peek inside ACACD, her ongoing experiment. Two others departed for foreign projects, which left Sherbert to concentrate fully on her main project in a locked lab. There were no graduate students vanishing or twisted portals to other dimensions involved, so every fiscal quarter the director stopped by, made appropriate humming noises when looking at the portable steel chamber she was putting together, and left after promising to get the mare’s bathroom down the hallway fixed yet again.

Several years passed.

Political turmoil and world events meant very little to Sherbert other than to bother her with unnecessary columns in the newspaper. Research journals fed her intellect as much as the food service in the building sustained her body, or perhaps more since the journals’ contents were far more varied than her regular meals. And on days when she forgot to eat, she had relatives to remind her.

“Hey, sis.” A familiar young stallion tapped on the outer office door several times. “You skipped breakfast again.”

“Busy,” called out Sherbert from the lab bench, where she had a screwdriver in her mouth for storage. Several other tools glowed yellow as they orbited her head, taking occasional jabs at the chunk of electronics spread out on the table and leaving little wisps of vaporized solder wafting up in the breeze from the building air conditioner. The rattle of keys followed, and Mix poked his nose into the central chamber where Sherbert was working.

“Nothing’s on fire, at least. Can I bring in a cleared visitor?”

“How cleared is she?” Sherbert did not look up until the resonant voice of Prime responded.

“Everything.” The balding stallion could easily have been mistaken for a ragged panhandler or ditchweed eater, bitless and cast out of society except for a weekly ration of government oats. That is until he spoke, with a crisp Oxford accent and absolute confidence in every word. Genius had more than one aspect, which is why Sherbert Lemon had never pitted her wits against his. Prime managed the intricate coordination of the various scientific entities in the building complex with a skill that she never could touch, even if she had wanted to shoulder that responsibility.

And she had the sneaking suspicion that he understood far more than a few random words in her reports.

“Poland is getting screwed over and split between two vicious animals disguised as countries,” continued Prime harshly, taking a moment to check his watch. “I have a meeting with B-19 in ten minutes. All visas to Europe have been canceled in the most delicate way possible, and every Equestrian we can find is making their way back through England. During this troubling time, I expect every employee of the organization to contribute as much as possible.”

Sherbert wiped her soldering iron on the wet sponge and placed it in the rack before responding. “How are we assisting Germany?”

“We are not,” said Prime. “In any regard, in any way.”

“We are allies of Germany,” said Sherbert right back.

Prime shook his head, letting his ragged mane sway. “Officially, we will remain scientific allies and militarily neutral until all of our citizens have made their escape. The evacuation has been going on in secret for a few months, and there are signs that some Equestrians have been detained. It is critical that we do not make any kind of disturbance until their situation has been resolved.”

There was a whirring noise, and the teletype at the other end of the room hammered out a short staccato series of letters. Prime turned his head fractionally, regarded the teletype, and strode slowly over to tear off the most recent message. He regarded it for a few moments, then walked over to place it on Sherbert’s cluttered workbench.

ASK ABOUT ROOT STOCK END

“Young lady,” started Prime very slowly, “that is classified above me. Do not ask. A team from B-19 will visit in the next few days to examine her lab, so do not touch it. And the same goes for ACACD.

The teletype whirred to life, then turned off without typing a single letter.

“Exactly.” Prime regarded the dense column of bolted-together steel pipe that made up ACACD, from the first broad section of steel that looked so crude on the bottom to the new top section with modern plexiglass so the slow twitch and rotation of the razor-thin ceramic disks inside could be observed. External light slowed the chemical reactions inside slightly, but the inconvenience was acceptable considering just what options had been added. Normally, ACACD was stored in her private laboratory, but she was somewhat portable with an umbilical cable, squat wheels, and a rack of lead-acid batteries for emergency power, so Sherbert had given in to her request and given her free reign over the central shared laboratory space. There seemed to be an unasked question in Prime’s expression, but her brother jumped to the hint before she could craft a proper explanation.

“She wanted a dog, sir. We did not have the chance to finish writing up a proper report on it, but the dog was a stray at the pound that had been run over by an automobile last year… and she wanted a dog,” finished Mix weakly.

“A dog.” Prime raised one ragged eyebrow, then shook his head. “As long as ACACD performs well, she can have whatever pets she wants. Which brings us to the reason I am here today. This request is to be classified far beyond anything you have been exposed to before. Your brother has already agreed to our request and will act as liaison to several other unnamed projects during this time. If you turn down this request, you and your experiments will be removed to a secure location, and your communications with others will be monitored.”

“They are already monitored,” said Sherbert flatly. “The Institute does not conceal that from us, and I have maintained your security provisions to the exact letter and intent. You may make your request.”

Prime nodded. “And ACACD? I thought I had seen everything in your lab. In particular, I don’t recall ACACD ever being able to listen in on conversations before.”

“Her only output is the teletype. The dog is running her audio receiving system. She has a shortwave receiver on the top floor of the institute, and for the microphone on the top of her case,” said Sherbert. “We bought it from the Americans, and it works as well as the line we have tied into the building telephone system.”

Prime stopped moving. He did not appear to be breathing either.

“So that’s why you had me help connect that bundle of circuits down in the wiring trunk room,” mused Mixed State. “It did make the phones a lot clearer and stopped cutting off calls, but I didn’t think Mother would eavesdrop on everypony.”

“Mister State,” said Prime very slowly. “Are you telling me you tapped our institute’s secure phone system so—” He waved at ACACD in lieu of any more words or possible profanity.

Mix shrugged. Sherbert decided to follow her step-brother’s lead and shrugged also, but added, “She only can listen. She gets bored calculating range tables and analyzing weather patterns. I gave her the shortwave receiver last year, and the microphone is new. We’ve enforced a rule that it can only be used for information, so no visitors can trigger a command. We had to do that when she started listening to the Lutheran Hour.”

It appeared as if Prime was in pain, possibly his ulcer acting up again, but he swallowed hard and addressed Sherbert directly. “Miss Lemon, I have been directed to ask you for permission to use ACACD to decrypt German communications, in particular the military code used to communicate with the U-49 out in the Manehattan harbor. Is that possible?”

“Yes, it is theoretically possible,” said Sherbert.

Enough tension eased that Prime’s shoulders no longer seemed quite so rigid, and he took a deep breath, but before he could say anything more, Sherbert added, “No, I will not permit it.”

“But…”

“Germany is our ally,” she said firmly. “We do not read their mail. If that is all, I will begin preparations to move to another laboratory as you specified.”

Prime said more words, but Sherbert was not listening. She continued her work, the only thing that was important at the moment, until Sun outside the wide laboratory windows had descended to bring the interior space into shadows. Only then did she walk across the empty office to flip on the lights and consider the cold paper sack of burritos that Mixed State had left for her several hours prior.

She might as well have eaten the paper sack for as much as she could taste the cold Spanish food. Then she returned to her work.

2. Her Enigma Machine

Equestria 1939 - Weird World War
Her Enigma Machine

“Now may God bless you all and may He defend the right. For it is evil things that we shall be fighting against, brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution. And against them I am certain that the right will prevail.”
— Neville Chamberlain, September 3, 1939

“Sweetie?” The faint tapping at the laboratory door woke Sherbert Lemon from where she had put her head down for just a moment in the middle of the night. Since Sun was well-up and shining in through the lab windows, the moment had lasted for far too long, and she picked up the cold soldering iron from where it had fallen when the auto-disconnect had unplugged it.

“Sweet Pea. Open up, please. Prime told me all about it, and I just want to talk.”

There were only a few vacuum tube mounts left to solder into the board, but Sherbert could not focus, and the soldering iron needed to be cleaned before she did any more work anyway. She shuffled up from the bench and unlocked the lab door even if she did not want to. After all, Mother would not approve of leaving her father out in the hallway.

Father was just as immaculately groomed as ever, in a suit jacket that undoubtedly cost as much as her best oscilloscope. The sharp creases could not conceal faint lines of worry in his face, or the way his cheerful yellow mane seemed dingy in the light. It had been several months since she had seen him last, although she still received his weekly correspondence along with the filled-out crossword puzzle from the Equestrian Sun. It was a gentle reminder that he was one of the few ponies who knew the secret beneath the stainless steel pipes and wires that made up ACACD. A copy of the Wall Street Journal was tucked under his foreleg with various creases indicating he had already finished a close examination of the American newspaper, although his copy of The Observer next to it was pristine.

“May I enter,” said Lemon Custard in a tone of voice that certainly was not a question.

“Why? asked Sherbert bluntly.

“I must make the effort to talk sense into you,” said Lemon. “Lord only knows I tried often enough with your mother. By sheer statistical probability, I must emerge victorious at least once in two decades. Besides, I have a copy of The Observer for Ven.”

Across the room, the teletype whirred into action and hammered out three letters. The paper input device that Sherbert had put together a year ago and improved ever since likewise thumped and clunked as the servos ran through a calibration routine and the illuminator cast a stark white light down on the table. Lemon Custard moved across the room as Sherbert stepped to one side, remaining silent as her father spread the newspaper out on the table and stepped back.

“I shall never understand what that mare sees in Orwell’s columns,” mused Lemon as the device sprang into motion and began to work its way down the newspaper. “Admittedly, he is a visionary, but eccentric.”

“I will not spy against our allies,” said Sherbert. “I don’t care what Prime says.”

“Allies.” Lemon unfolded his copy of the Wall Street Journal and held it out to Sherbert. It was a few days out of date since travel between Equestria and the colonies was more erratic than ever. “I do not believe an ocean will protect Equestria when Germany inevitably sets their sights on America. We are a natural stepping stone across the Atlantic, and I do not see a way to avoid being stepped on by either side. All of Europe is feeling the tread of the German boot, and the Russians are more than happy to carve off whatever land they can. This war will spread until it reaches our shores, and we must do what we can to protect ourselves.”

“If Celestia wanted to avoid being dragged into this conflict, she should remain neutral like Equestria did during the Great War.” Keeping her head down, Sherbert leafed through several pages of the American newspaper just to humor her father. It was filled with lies and half-truths like all papers, but the Journal was far more reliable than most of the rest of the mess. “America will not enter the war, and the conflict will die out once Germany has expanded to fill the surrounding countries. They have inefficient governments, rife with corruption, and their armies are obsolete. The result will be a much more sensible Europe, able to hold their own against the communists.”

Lemon Custard stood silent for a few moments, then shook his head. “It is so disconcerting to hear your mother’s words coming out of your mouth,” he admitted. “She moderated her determination near the end, though. We had a long discussion about her concerns during breakfast one day, although not for long enough. She was going to speak with you next, but she had an experiment to run, and…”

He turned and nosed into his trim glossy saddlebag, eventually emerging with a small pasteboard box which Sherbert unsealed with her magic.

“Malties,” said Sherbert quietly. “That is not fighting fair, Father.”

The small chocolate-covered candies tasted overly strong on her tongue after her evening of sleeping on the lab bench, cloying in her throat until she had to cough. Lemon Custard took several of them also, then dug around in his saddlebags until he found two cardboard boxes of chocolate milk, still chilled.

“I never understood your mother or her projects very well,” admitted Lemon. “I’ll admit I was surprised as everyone else when she passed away, but when the images of her brain scans went missing for several days, I knew exactly what you had done. She longed for immortality to the point of obsession, and in one way, you are part of that. A fraction of her genius moving on to continue her work after she was gone, as her mother before her. Part of me believes that she waits for us in the Eternal Pastures as promised, and another part of me is convinced that she haunts your machine just to keep giving Prime’s ulcer exercise. I trusted her judgment. Do you?”

He ate another one of the malted milk balls, washing it down with milk, which gave Sherbert a chance to consider his words. She moved over to the teletype keyboard and typed in a command, although she did not want to. It was an admission that she could be wrong, and her inner child fought with her inner scientist at every chunk of the mechanical keyboard.

CALCULATE BEGIN MOST PROBABLE RESULT OF EQUESTRIA REMAINING NEUTRAL IN CURRENT CONFLICT END SUMMARIZE DISPLAY BY YEAR END ACTIVATE

There should have been flashing lights and ringing bells, perhaps a rattle of paper tape in a reader. Instead, the stainless steel body of ACACD merely whirred and clicked slightly louder while Sherbert ate a few more malted milk balls.

It brought back memories of sitting with her father at the administrative office where they had received the news, and the taste of the same candy he had brought for the far more pleasant occasion of taking her and Mixed State on a trip to the Manehattan zoo, much as he had done when they were foals.

She had cried, just a little, but Mixed had offered her the last malted milk ball in the box to calm her down and suddenly it had not felt as bad. After all, he had been crying also. Madam Vernier had not been his mother, but she doted on the child with presents every Christmas and Newton’s Birthday, as well as the scooter which he had promptly taken out into the street and knocked his front teeth out in a collision with a wagon.

It wasn’t as if Mixed State was accident-prone, but Sherbert never let him inside the laboratory while she was running any experiments and nothing blew up, so she preferred not to test the theory.

The teletype whirred to life again, chunking out several lines before going silent.

1939 CURRENT YEAR RELATIVE QUIET WITH SEVERAL HUNDRED EQUESTRIANS UNABLE TO RETURN
1940 BRITAIN FRANCE AFRICA OTHER EUROPEAN NATIONS TAKE EQUESTRIAN HOSTAGES AS WAR EXPANDS TO COVER ALL EUROPE 1941 FRANCE INVADED MORE EQUESTRIANS CAPTURED AND HELD AMERICA ENTERS WAR JAPAN ENTERS WAR ALL COUNTRIES HOLD EQUESTRIANS HOSTAGE 1942 GERMANY ATTACKS RUSSIA JAPAN ATTACKS AMERICA EQUESTRIAN PORTS BLOCKADED BY AMERICA TO PREVENT GERMAN USE 1943 EQUESTRIA BECOMES CONFLICT POINT BETWEEN AMERICA AND GERMANY 1944 UNEXPECTED WEAPON USED BY AMERICA OR GERMANY EQUESTRIAN CASUALTIES IN THE THOUSANDS 1945 PROBABILITY VARIANCE EXCEEDS TOLERANCE SHUTTING DOWN SIMULATION END

Hours later, there was a faint tapping at the laboratory door, and Sherbert called out without even looking. “Go away, Mix.”

Instead, the door creaked open and her brother looked inside, seeming pleased that she was not building some sort of mechanical monster or death ray.

“Dad said you didn’t take it well.”

Sherbert did not answer at first. She just continued reading through the stack of newspapers, making marks on certain articles as she went. Mix had dealt with his big sister before, so he left her stew in the silence until an answer came out in its own sweet time.

“Remember when Mother and I took you on a visit to Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich a little over ten years ago?”

“Of course.” Mixed State nosed into his saddlebag and brought out a box of Malties, which he tore open with his teeth. “Found out about malted milk there. Dad let me drink malts until I was sick. Still like ‘em, though.”

A few malted milk balls helped Sherbert’s bad mood, and she crunched quietly while Mix kept talking.

“The Germans had so many innovative projects, so many advances in technology. When they offered her a position on the university staff, I thought for sure she was going to stay, and I’d never see you again when Dad went home. They didn’t want a candy-maker. Only a mad scientist to work on their schemes.”

“Father would have hated it in Germany,” mused Sherbert between bites. “Too rigid. Controlled.”

“Not to mention the… unrest. Mostly driven by the Communists, of course. They still have the delusion that Equestria was behind the Romanov abduction, and Mother was a convenient target. You know I was about eight when we took the trip,” said Mix. “You showed me all the pictures you took on the rest of the trip after Dad and I went home, including the pyramids and your rock samples from the Vesuvius eruption.”

“Yeah.”

Sherbert continued to play with the empty box until her half-brother said, “This is only the start. So many people are dying. Ponies, also. If they’re not stopped…”

“I know.” Sherbert let out a hesitant breath. “It just feels wrong.”

“I don’t think there is ever a right way to have a war,” said Mix. “Dad took us to Verdun on our way home.”

The two of them remained silent for a while, thinking about the terrible war that had swept across the European continent a few decades ago.

“Mother wanted to make the world a better place,” admitted Sherbert. “Sometimes, her methods were a little odd to the uninitiated.”

“Or the sane,” said Mix.

Ignoring her brother for the moment, Sherbert turned to look at ACACD. “I don’t see how I can be of any help, even if I wanted to. I don’t have any background in numerical encryption. Mother and I have been more focused on biology. It was awkward enough to make those artillery charts. All I would be changing is what humans die when.”

“I’ve had a little experience with cryptography,” admitted Mix, which would have been an accurate statement if he had claimed the same about a thousand other subjects. If there ever was a brilliant expert in everything but nothing at all, Mixed State held that title firmly. “Single-pad ciphers are unbreakable, but the sheer mass of information you have to accumulate at each end of the conversation make them impractical for any military use. Modern rotating wheel ciphers seem to be the best solution for now since each end merely needs to know the key used to encrypt and decrypt the message.”

“And the method,” said Sherbert while eating a few more Malties, only to look up abruptly as the teletype hammered out a brief message.

CLOSE YOUR MOUTH WHILE CHEWING STOP

“The cipher wheels,” said Mix, who had carefully swallowed before speaking. “Without knowing what is on the wheels or how they are arranged—”

“It makes a chess game look simple,” said Sherbert. “Played blind, without hearing the other player’s moves. Assaulting the problem by random chance is right out. Unless you have the key and the encrypted message and the decrypted message to work with. And you know how many cipher wheels you’re dealing with, and how they are wired together.”

Sherbert shook the empty box of Malties, regarded the last one that landed on her hoof, and frowned. With a faint green glow of her magic, she crumpled up the cardboard box, focusing on her special talent in unicorn magic until there were several malted milk balls on her hoof and the box was nothing but a few flecks of flaked-off dyes. She divided the pile into two, floating half to her brother while she thought. At least there was a starting point, even if the task was impossible.

“The Germans have passed messages on to Princess Celestia, correct?”

“They use a different code for that,” said Mix. “Something that only the diplomats have. There are about five or six different groups in Germany with different codes, and they change them according to whim, I think. We could totally unwind one of them just to have it changed again a few weeks later.”

“If I decide to take on the project,” said Sherbert.

“If.” Mix wiped his chocolate-stained hoof against his coat, a habit that bothered Sherbert considerably and that she had never been able to break him of. “I know you. Like Mom, you start out pointed in the wrong direction, all determined and obstinate. Then you start picking at the problem around the edges. Seeing what is wrong. Then you have this brilliant flash and the solution becomes obvious, even if it is as screwy as a tree full of squirrels. This time, you could save lives.”

“People will die if I do this,” said Sherbert. “Mostly Germans.”

“They chose this path,” said Mix with unusual ferocity. It set Sherbert back a moment, until she caught his surreptitious glance at Root Stock’s locked lab door. She did not want to say anything, though, and she would have been content to sit in silence forever if not for the hammering of the teletype across the room.

ASK ABOUT ROOT STOCK END

Mix answered before she could say a word. “I don’t know. I haven’t gotten a letter back from her in months. I mean I know the mail is shot to ribbons, but she had a shortwave set too, and I listen every night. I’m worried.”

“I see.” And she did, finally. She had never wondered why Mixed State had always been available around the lab whenever Root Stock needed help moving a heavy experiment or supplies. It had not really seemed important to her since Mix was the master of his own fate and there was no real need for her to confuse romance and science. “You two are in a relationship?”

“I don’t know.” Mix got up and went over to the glassware cabinet, rummaging around for a clean beaker. “Maybe. Maybe not. She’s the first mare who would talk to me for more than a minute or two. Other than you, of course.”

“I’ve seen you talking with mares in the cafeteria,” countered Sherbert while Mix was running two beakers of water. She thought for a time while drinking, then placed her empty beaker back into the wash basin before continuing. “You have a point, figuratively,” and patted him on the head the way her mother used to do.

It was not all bad having an earth pony for a brother, even if he could not help with her magical experiments. In fact, that was probably a good thing. The young unicorn who Father had married after the divorce had been quite pleased with an earth pony colt, and although they had had more unicorn foals, one brilliant brother was plenty for Sherbert. Or stars forbid, another sister.

Mix’s pocketwatch took that moment to chime the hour, and he jumped up from the workbench in his traditional instant-shift from immobility to frantic speed. “Gotta go. Prime has a list of tasks for me today, and I’ll bring one of Rootie’s friends by the lab tomorrow. He’s a bit of a chemhead, but maybe you two can bond over long-chain polymer synthesis. If you’re going to take this on, that is.”

The teletype whirred into action and began to hammer out a short message.

NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD PONIES TO COME TO THE AID OF THEIR COUNTRY
USE KBD TO CHANGE PROCESSING PRIORITY ENIGMA TO 1

“I can’t say,” said Sherbert instead. “No promises.”

3. Spies Like Us

Equestria 1939 - Weird World War
Spies Like Us

POLISH CAPITAL POUNDED BY GERMAN LAND AND AIR FORCES
— New York Time headline, September 6, 1939

Sherbert Lemon was mad. No, not that way. Angry at least. She had things to do, most of which were distractions from deciding on her volunteered project. Getting trotted down to the main floor of the building for some dog-and-pony show was not on her list.

It was on Prime’s list.

She wanted to get a good lab when she was forced out of the building for rejecting her task.

Some small part of her wanted a tower filled with bats and a pipe organ, but she squelched that urge firmly.

Germany would certainly give her a lab, but the appeal of that theoretical move was dwindling rapidly. Equestria wanted her mind. Germany would want her soul. In order to sway her opinion, Prime had loaned her several of the intelligence papers that had come out of German laboratories, delivered by a solemn Royal Guard with no emotion who stood by her side every moment the folder was open, ensured she did not take notes, and sealed the papers back up in a locked saddlebag before departing.

Mother had a few friends who would have been fascinated by what she had read, provided they could be released from prison or raised from the dead. Sherbert was starting to wonder if she would be able to sleep any more, particularly with the news coming out of Europe.

So she came downstairs out of her lab when requested, waited where she was told, and moved forward into the interview room when it was her turn. At that point, all of the routine she had expected was turned on its head.

An alicorn waited patiently by the table for her, but not Princess Celestia. That left only one option, unless there had been a scientific breakthrough that Sherbert was unaware.

“Ah, Sherbert J. Lemon,” said Princess Cadence with the faint rustle of feathers as she stood up. The pretty pink princess took up a considerable amount of space in the small room, made smaller by the quiet unicorn guard at the door. Cadence had an honest smile, a warm embrace, and a most compassionate expression when she sat Sherbert down on her side of the table. Being ‘Cadenced’ was quite unlike any experience Sherbert had with other royalty, including the brief and distant glimpse of Princess Celestia at the funeral, but it was familiar. It was also much like her mother had behaved when she was about to give Sherbert bad news, which worried her.

“Are you conducting interviews about our projects, Princess?” asked Sherbert while Cadence was settling down on her own cushion.

“Oh, heavens no,” said the young alicorn, holding a wing across her chest. “All these complicated magical and scientific projects are so above me. I just wanted to sit and talk with you for a while before Shiny and I take off on our trip to France for my diplomatic meeting.”

“Complicated,” said Sherbert flatly. “You talked theory with my mother the last time you met.”

“Just vague generalities,” claimed Cadence with a wave of her wing as if she could brush away the accusation of an actual mind behind her fluffy exterior.

“You offered suggestions to my mother. Good suggestions,,” continued Sherbert. “Why play the fool for diplomatic meetings with the humans in the middle of a war?” Her eyes slipped sideways to view the quiet unicorn guard at the door, who was chuckling quietly to himself. “Is he the spy or are you?”

That stopped the guard’s mirth instantly, and he returned to an immobile stance in front of the door.

“Both,” muttered Sherbert. “I suppose the people who can’t work up the nerve to talk with you or who want to keep some level of anonymity corner your coltfriend—”

At that, the guard’s eyes widened and he cast an almost desperate look at Cadence, who had taken it as her turn to giggle. “My word. You are certainly your mother’s daughter. If it were not for your experiment, I’d be tempted to take you along on our trip to Paris, just to see what kind of insights you could dig up out of the old fossils they have trying to talk Germany out of its actions.

The cheerful and smiling alicorn turned serious in the blink of an eye. “They’re going to fail, of course. In a year or two, all of Europe will be in flames, from Britain to Africa.”

“And Russia, and Japan, and the colonists,” said Sherbert.

“Worse.” Princess Cadence lowered her head to look at the table. “I haven’t told anybody except Shining Armor, but Princess Celestia has been… off a bit lately. I really wish I could talk to your mother about it, the way she was before, of course,” added Cadence in a rush.

“Off?” asked Sherbert, a little discouraged at the vague reference.

“She’s concerned. There are dark times ahead that have nothing to do with the growing war. Auntie’s been feeling… incomplete. And not in that way,” said Cadence when Sherbert took a brief glance at Shining Armor. “It’s been getting worse over the last year. Something dark is coming, something that nobody expects and she won’t talk about it. Not one word, and believe me, I’ve tried. That’s why I’ve taken over so much of the diplomacy with the humans. It lifts some small portion of the load she is under and gives her time to prepare.”

“For something,” said Sherbert. “That’s remarkably vague.”

“Intelligence seldom has clear-cut answers, unlike science. Auntie Celestia tells me even generations later, it can be impossible to know if a decision was the right one, or just random chance. Still, helping Germany with its efforts can only lead to more bloodshed, more deaths. They will not stop until they are stopped.” Cadence pushed several books across the table. “Exiles pass through Equestria on their way to the Americas every day. Some of them sell what few possessions they own in order to continue their journey.”

“Like books,” said Sherbert with her head cocked to one side in order to read the titles.

“Like books,” said Cadence. “Celestia makes sure the prices do not fall with the influx, and extends a helping hoof for anyhuman who is left out so they have the money to keep going. Otherwise, Manehattan would be filled to overflowing. Can you imagine having to flee your home for a foreign land with no more than you can carry on your back?”

“Mother made me prepare a torches and pitchforks package,” said Sherbert. “I have two passports, and bank accounts in New York and Berlin.”

Ever so slowly, Princess Cadence closed her eyes. “I keep forgetting that you are your mother’s daughter.”

“I understand what you are saying,” continued Sherbert. “You want to guilt me into empathizing with the refugees that Germany is driving out of their countries, call upon my better nature in order to agree with your dishonest spying, and throw myself into the project without thinking of the ponies and people who would die from my actions. In much more politic words,” she added. “It is unneeded. I have already decided to take on this project, although it is futile.”

“Difficult, not futile,” said Cadence, and added in a rush, “but don’t tell me what the project is.”

That set Sherbert back a few mental paces until she thought about it some more, and the only thought that made sense was one that chilled her to the bone. “What you don’t know, you can’t tell, intentionally or accidentally. You… could be captured? Who would dare take one of Equestria’s princesses captive?”

“People who invade other countries,” said Cadence. “Desperate people. Cruel people. And stupid people. They may think they can twist Equestria’s tail by taking me captive, or killing me. Perhaps torturing me for information. That’s why I’m only taking pegasus guards with me to Paris. Desperate people can do horrible things. We have no way to tell what Germany is planning without… Well, I shouldn’t talk to you about these things.”

Sherbert turned to look at the unicorn guard, then back at Princess Cadence who had just begun to get up from the table. “You’re leaving him behind?”

“Physically.” Cadence smiled, and Sherbert could see just a little bit of her mother reflected in her violet eyes. “I will carry Shining Armor in my heart forever, much like you carry your mother… Well, that’s an inaccurate analogy,” added the princess as the guard looked puzzled. “He has critical training in Canterlot to keep him occupied in my absence. Auntie Celestia must be protected while I am away. And we have a long flight, so I must be going now. Oh, and just one more thing.”

Cadence floated a small metal object out of the book bag on the table and put it in front of Sherbert. “When Auntie Celestia asked your mother for assistance in the Great War, she made these for our sea patrols. Quietly, of course. This is the prototype she gave to Celestia when she was asked. Your mother knew war was going to break out, and she had already made plans. Keep it as a memory. Her actions saved the lives of many Equestrians during that difficult time, and I hope you can help in a similar way.”

And with that, Princess Cadence and her quiet guard were gone, leaving Sherbert alone in the room with her thoughts.

“Stay out,” called Sherbert when somepony started knocking on her lab door.

“Are you doing an experiment or are you just being crabby?” asked Mixed State from the other side.

Rather than verbally spar with her half-brother, Sherbert put a bookmark into several of her research books and went to open the door, which she had secured with the deadbolt for a change. Unfortunately, Mix was not alone on the other side of the door.

“Before you close the door,” started Mix quickly, “Prime sent him.”

That did squelch Sherbert’s immediate reaction enough that she only had the door part-way closed before she stopped. The human by Mixed State’s side was not threatening or military in any regard, other than being slightly stocky and shorter than average. He had aged enough for his short mane to go entirely to white in just a fringe that went around the back of his head and left nothing on the top, which still looked bizarre to Sherbert’s Equestrian instincts despite how common it was among human males. And his face was completely bald except for bushy eyebrows and a small tuft of hair on his neck which had missed the razor this morning.

He was wearing a suit, which Sherbert expected. Practically every human who visited was dressed up, and they all were dressed. This suit had seen quite a few years of wear with patches on the elbows, the distinctive scent of tobacco, and several fountain pens in the pockets instead of a folded kerchief. Upon consideration, he could have been a professor of some sort, and Prime had sent him, so he most likely was not entirely useless, therefore she held the door open until her two guests had stepped inside, and closed it after them.

“Fräulein Doktor Lemon, I presume,” the man began in precise German. “I’ve seen you several times in the cafeteria, but have not had the pleasure of meeting you in person. We hate to impose, but time is limited. I am Herman Guttman, formerly a chemical engineer for Bromberg DAG but now a research fellow at your fine institute. Prime has assigned me the task of coordinating the various entities involved in the… new priorities we have been given.”

“You’re the spy mastermind,” said Sherbert flatly.

Mister Guttman spread his thick-fingered hands, which Sherbert noted had their fair share of calluses and healed scars detailing a more than theoretical knowledge of his craft. “No spying. We merely supply the tools for intelligence agencies, and until I began work in Equestria, I had no idea what ingenious tools had been developed by your people. I read of your mother’s work in the field of theoretical chemical bonding in Retorts and Reactions, and I’ll admit the implications of her theories could be ground-breaking if ever put into practice. I would have loved to meet her again while she was alive, but I understand she passed some years ago in a laboratory accident before I arrived in your fair country.”

Sherbert merely remained looking at the human before repeating one phrase. “Meet her again?”

“We met in… Excuse me, but German does not translate well.” He cleared his throat and continued in crisp Equestrian, “At the University of Lower Manehattan in Calcination and Conjunction class. That’s where I was interred during the war. They put us through so many classes we did not have time to think about escape. I still find myself writing chemical equations in Equestrian notation on occasion.”

“Ah,” said Mix. “You were stationed on board the U-33. I read about it in history class.”

“Wireless operator, although for a very brief period. I was young and foolish. Oh, a clacker,” he added with a glance at Sherbert’s overloaded lab table. “That brings back memories.”

“This?” Sherbert lifted the strange device that Princess Cadence had given her, turning it over in her magic until the stocky human took it gingerly out of her magical grasp.

“Disarmed, at least,” said Guttman as he examined the bottom of the device. “Last I saw one of these was in 1915 on the upper ballast tank of our submarine.”

“And,” prompted Mix. “That wasn’t in our history lessons.”

Guttman hesitated, then settled down on one of the uncomfortable lab chairs, still holding the device. “We were supposed to mine the Manehattan harbor since a number of American ships had made port there after being damaged by torpedoes, and somebody up in the high command thought it would be a good idea to antagonize a quiet neutral. During daylight hours, we snuck in close by battery, but right before it got dark, something started pecking on the hull like a woodpecker. Speed dependent, faster when we sped up, slower when we slowed. So the captain checked all around by periscope and surfaced to see what was the matter.” The human spun a small propeller on the device and grunted in thought. “Didn’t see the zeppelin hovering overhead until it was too late. Tiny little thing. Held about three pegasi and one bomb.”

“I would think the captain of the German submarine would have fought,” said Sherbert.

“He was in shock. All of us were. And—” Guttman kept spinning the little propeller on the widget until it gave out a sharp click and a sharp pointed needle poked out where a blasting cap could have been fastened. “If he had submerged, water flow would have finished winding the devices and set the magnetic mines off, punching holes in the upper ballast tank. We couldn’t rush the hatch to attack the pegasi, and even if we had, there was a hundred-kilo bomb right above us. So we followed meekly along until we docked in the Manehattan harbor we were supposed to mine and the crew was taken away. A week later, we heard the entire submarine was taken apart and stored somewhere.”

“That still doesn’t explain how you met my mother in prison,” said Sherbert flatly.

That seemed to be humorous to the human, although he did not laugh for very long. “Prison,” he scoffed. “There were no facilities for human prisoners. None in the entire country. No, they put us into school. Manehattan Institute for Advanced Knowledge. Worked us like horses. By 1918 when hostilities were over, I had learned your fine language, gotten my degree in chemistry and electronic design, and determined that some classes in school were not suitable for people without the ability to use magic. Most of the crew left with degrees also. The captain taught several classes in military history, I believe. Cheered for the Manehattan Shokkars hoofball team. One of the crew dated a local, but nothing came of that. Your mother had some serious opinions about such relationships. We talked during study periods for CnC 105i⁽*⁾. She was an excellent instructor and kept me from blowing up at least twice, although my crew were transferred back to Germany right before final exams. Negatively affected my final grade, but—” he shrugged “—that’s the way armistice works.”
(*) The Inadvisable series of classes, held next to the Surgical Collegium for good reason.
—

It did not seem like a good time to tell the human that the magnetic mine he was toying with had been the product of her mother’s school project.

“I read all of her articles in various journals, but I spent the last three days reading up on her recent work that never made it to print, and for good reason.” Mister Guttman shook his head. “Skimming, mostly. Without unicorn magic, humans could never even begin to try her experiments. And your work…”

When no more words became apparent, Sherbert continued for him. “My work has little bearing on encryption.” She did not add anything about her opinion on why exactly Prime was allowing a human access to such secrets, and the advisability thereof.

It did bring up a rather uncomfortable point.

“Prime gave you material on all of my mother’s research and my own?” she asked.

“Yes,” he huffed while getting up and scrounging around the glassware collection for a clean beaker. “No questions, no blood-curdling threats. Just folders. Although he said there was one aspect of your research that it was best I learn about directly. Something called ACACD.”

She should have expected it. Sherbert had not put anything down in writing about her mother’s last wishes or the science experiment which had brought it to fruition, at least in part. Rather than dance around the point until they were both exhausted and still not making any progress on her task, Sherbert nodded her head toward the collection of steel pipes and wiring of ACACD.

“Herr Guttmann, this is the Analog Circuitry Automated Calculating Device, or Acked as Mixed State likes to call her. I think it is improper, since it contains my mother. Mother, please say hello to Herr Guttman.”

The teletype whirred to life and hammered out a short message, leaving the puzzled German scientist to walk over and read it, still holding his beaker of water.

Or at least until he lost his grip and the beaker plummeted to the floor, leaving Sherbert to catch it in her magic before it shattered.

HELLO HERMAN HAVE YOU COMPLETED YOUR EXTRA CREDIT PROJECT FOR GRADUATION YET STOP

4. What Lies Beneath

Equestria 1939 - Weird World War
What Lies Beneath

Poles surrender Westerplatte Fortress in Danzig Harbor.
— New York Times, September 8, 1939

Humans had a peculiar way to react when confronted with unexpected information.

Ponies were sensible. Threats meant running around so predators could not pick out one victim in the milling mess, with screaming to disconcert the attacker. Sherbert had never told a human about her mother’s situation, but Prime had taken the news with considerable un-reaction, and Mixed State had simply absorbed the news with little more than warranted curiosity about the details and asking if this would affect his educational stipend.

Mister Guttman had reacted in a very non-pony fashion. He froze, remaining completely immobile except for breathing.

After a certain amount of time spent staring at the ACACD structure, Guttman held onto the beaker of water that Sherbert returned to him, took several sips, then managed in a very small voice, “You put your own mother into…” He rather redundantly pointed at the complex amalgam of stainless steel pipes and wires that made up ACACD.

“It was her last wish. She wanted to continue her work.” Sherbert patted the top of the last steel flange holding the plexiglass cover secure. “I thought that maybe when I’m too old to continue, or if there’s some sort of accident—”

“It’s not that bad,” said Mix once he saw Mr. Guttman was at a loss for words and that his sister was wandering into territory that unnerved the human. “Madame Vernier has gone on to the Eternal Pastures. ACACD is only a shadow of her mind, an echo if that helps you understand.”

“I understood Mary Shelly did fairly well in Frankenstein,” muttered Guttman. He remained quiet for a moment, observing the metallic mother and the faint clicks that came from inside as various discs rearranged to different configurations.

“Mother has been listening to radio reports coming in from Europe,” said Sherbert, who had returned to her soldering. “The printout is in the bin.”

The human sat down with the stack of paper and seemed to gain some grasp on his wits by reviewing the plain text of the teletype. It kept him quiet, which was fine for Sherbert because she had work to do. The circuit she was creating had little chance of solving the issue, but it made a good practice piece while waiting.

It took less time than Sherbert expected for Guttman to reach the bottom of the printout, and she was relatively unprepared for his simple question.

“A crossword puzzle?”

“Oh, tear that section off and we’ll send it to the Canterlot Sun. Mother always loved crosswords, so she’s been making them for the newspaper over the last few months.”

He eyed the last section of grey-bar paper and asked another question that made Sherbert up his estimated intelligence by a few notches.

“Are you certain she is not passing information to the Germans by way of this?”

It was a logical extension of the classification process which she could not answer, but ACACD responded before she could give the question full consideration.

NEVER STOP INFORMATION SENT TO FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE COULD COMPROMISE OFFSPRING SAFETY STOP

There was a brief pause while the teletype whirred, then added, INCLUDING MIXED STATE STOP

“It’s nice to know she still cares,” said Mix. “And your next question is going to be how my big sister managed to put Madame Vernier into ACACD, right?”

“It… would help,” admitted Guttman, who sat down on one of the uncomfortable tall lab chairs and dropped the printout on the table in front of him. “Use small words, please.”

“I have to,” said Mix. “There are several thousand disks included in ACACD’s central core, photographs of Madame Vernier’s brain after she was crystalized by a runaway experiment and killed. Or more correctly, copies of the photographs. Watch my sister for a moment. She’s about to do her little trick.”

It was not a little trick. It was a complicated spell she had found by accident when she got her cutie mark and used ever since, although mostly Mix thought of it as a way to get more candy out of a box. She focused on the wire-wrapped circuit next to the box of bakelite fragments and metal samples, picking it up in her magic and concentrating until two circuits could be gently placed back down on the lab table.

“Sis broke into the… Well, we broke into the storage room where they had stored the photographs. She made copies in Mom’s lab, and then we returned the originals without anypony knowing. Thousands of pages of microfiche, newspaper archives, reference books, and anything we could find that had been processed that way were placed on more silicate disks and mounted on spindles, all suspended from each other by a liped membrane as a cushion and transmission medium. They rotate independently when calculating or storing information. She’s highly inefficient and has substantial eccentricities, but she can derive things that would take rooms full of calculating devices years to finish. Weather predictions, crossword puzzles, protein folding configurations, thaumic charge evaluation. Building ACACD never could have been done in other countries because only Equestria has the magic concentration necessary.”

“Or the laws regarding scientific experimentation,” said Guttman, who promptly moderated his tone with, “At least the way the laws used to exist.”

“You cannot expect us to hear that kind of line without the explanation behind it.” Mix cocked a curious eyebrow at his sister, but Sherbert shook her head.

“If Prime wanted you read into the documents I’ve seen, he would have.”

It took a while, but eventually Mixed State nodded. “I’m exposed to far too many external contacts. Even though I know about this project, it would be best if you kept me in the dark about any progress. What I don’t know—”

“You can’t leak.” Guttman heaved a sigh. “Every nation is trying to read each other’s codes. Knowing that we are trying is not a secret. Knowing if we succeed is. Mix, if I could have a few minutes alone with your sister?”

“I have another appointment, anyway. No kissing.”

And with that, Mixed State was gone before Sherbert could form an adequate retort.

* * *

Guttman was a splendid conversationalist. He spoke very little and read quietly, making a list of questions rather than asking them intermittently and otherwise allowing Sherbert to continue her work without interruption. It was a peaceful kind of research, stopped hours later by the whirr of the teletype and a short message.

PRIME ARRIVING STOP

“I suppose this means I should make a formal decision on this project,” said Sherbert. “I’m in.”

EVERY POST IS HONORABLE IN WHICH A PONY CAN SERVE HER COUNTRY STOP

“My mother was a student of fractious humans,” said Sherbert. “Static and unchanging means decay. Mold. Death. She appreciated the revolutionary, how they broke the chains of routine and brought forth new ideas. She always said the difference between good change and bad change could only be determined years later, if at all.”

She put the electronic circuit she was considering redesigning into the parts box for use as raw material. Ponies were so inferior to circuits and wires. Once created, they were. There was no going back. Minor changes could be made during upbringing, for good or ill, but they were fixed in one course. Her own cutie mark of matched flasks was only a bump in the path her mother placed her upon. This new project could only be the same. She lived to perfect her mother’s work. When this project was over, she would return to the path. Nothing would change, and it bothered her the more she thought about it.

“I sense hesitation in your voice. Just a bit of fear,” said Guttman, who had not moved from his perch on one of the tall laboratory chairs. “Fear of trying, or fear of failure?”

“I don’t like to lose. Neither did mother.”

“Losing what?” asked Guttman.

Sherbert did not have an answer.

They continued to work in silence until there was a quiet knock at the door, and Sherbert opened it with a touch of her magic. Prime stood there for a moment, looking at the two of them engrossed in their own studies, then shook his head slowly.

“She’s in,” said Guttman. “Both of them.”

“Expected. Ho, ho, ho.” Prime continued into the room, towing an overloaded red metal wagon behind him. Brown paper packages the size of books piled high threatened to spill over with every step, and the sheer incongruity of a child’s toy being used in that fashion cut a hint of levity through Sherbert’s overlaying concern.

“You are not Santa Hooves,” said Sherbert. “He’s a myth.”

“More like Nightmare Night,” said Prime. “If you are to carve this pumpkin, you deserve the sharpest knife available. The organization has a number of resources acquired by our agents over the last few years. Many of them were obtained by… immoral methods, from immoral people. I’m not sure how much good they will do, but I’m positive you will find them more useful here than sealed up in a room somewhere. Good luck.”

And then he was gone also.

Guttman got up from his chair and looked the little red wagon over from top to bottom before taking off the first paper package and opening it. “I’m not certain how much confidence it shows that our superior is delivering our research materials in a Skippy Racer children’s wagon.”

“I brought that from home,” said Sherbert. “My father gave it to me. I used to pull my brother around when we went out into the city. Interesting payload, though.” She opened several books, creasing the brown paper along straight lines and placing it to one side until she found a thick folder. “The Germans have broken the British Administrative code.”

“That’s based on subtractor tables,” said Guttman from behind the book he was reading. “Totally different than a rotor based system. But how does Equestria know—”

“Spies.” Sherbert continued to open books and folders, making a stack of the folded brown paper covers to one side. “It appears the Poles cracked an earlier version of Enigma without an actual machine, although the device has been modified since then so the same approach will not work. Mister Rejewski has quite a collection of notes in this folder. I’m quite certain he’s unaware of their distribution.” Sherbert concentrated for a moment. “There are hints of my duplication magic on this copy, leading me to believe Q branch had a hoof in their acquisition.”

“It’s hard to think of you ponies as espionage agents,” admitted Guttman. He scratched his bare chin and thought. “I suppose that makes them more effective.”

“One of the tasks of Q branch is to provide agents of Equestria with resources, as it seems my mother had during the Great War.” She picked up the clacker and spun the propeller absently. “A trinket, with several intentional design flaws to appear cruder than it is. Mother never liked to show her whole talent to others. I was more trusting of Prime, and I’m unsure if I should be angry at him or relieved that my enchantments were used in this fashion.”

“I understand. We made chemicals,” said Guttman with a nod of his head. “Never knew for certain what they were used for after they left the factory.”

Sherbert winced. “My duplication spell is different than mere chemical formula.”

Guttman gave her a skeptical look. “I’ve seen duplication spells before.”

“Mine is permanent.”

He raised one bushy eyebrow and put aside the book he was looking through. “Thaumic material created by spell has a finite lifespan. I did pay attention in class, after all.”

“I don’t create anything out of thaums,” said Sherbert, floating another book onto her pile.

“Newton would have a coronary if he saw what you unicorns do, but you can’t just create something out of nothing.”

“Issac Newton was a human with no insight.” Sherbert placed a promising book on top of her priority pile, then opened it and examined the flyleaf on a whim. “Some of these are your books.”

“Duplicates. Most of them are not mine.” Guttman ran a finger down the spine of a red book with handwritten lettering on the cover. “The unicorn paper duplication spell makes sense. It takes blank paper and an ink supply to replicate a written work. Unicorns have used it for generations. A unicorn with the spell never lacks for employment in the human world, no matter how much other humans despise it and seek to replicate it in machines. But yours…”

“My personal trick is a little more complicated,” responded Sherbert curtly. “It requires an equivalent amount of each element involved in order to make a duplicate. Organics, even, although the end result is not fertile in the case of fruit.”

She did not bring up the time that Mixed State had an ailing pet lizard and wanted to see if she could make a healthy duplicate. Even her mother had agreed post-experiment and cleanup that some scientific thresholds deserved to remain uncrossed. Sherbet took a breath and continued, “If done correctly, the duplicate is identical to the original, and permanent.”

“Permanent? Well, of course. You wouldn’t lie to me about this.”

“Yes, I would.” Sherbert lifted the last book out of the bottom of the little red wagon as the words spilled out. She had never felt so rudderless in a storm, not since her mother died, and she could not keep her emotions bottled up any more.

“If it would allow me to proceed along my chosen path of unrestricted scientific progress, I would lie to you, to Prime, to every creature in Equestria. I would cheat, steal, or murder. I’m a monster in a pony skin, who can only destroy. We strive for creation, but my creations have only proven useful for destruction, and by the time I am fed into the fire, my way will be lit by the destruction I have caused. Just like my mother.”

“Huh.” Herr Guttman said nothing else for a long time, turning pages and making notes with a fountain pen in a small book, much the same way Sherbert was keeping her own. When it grew dark outside, he blew across the ink to dry it before standing up and stretching.

“Fräulein Lemon, your mother was far from an unlimited force of destruction, and your creation proves it as well as my own situation. Even though it was her device which caused my incarceration, I left your custody in far better condition than I entered. From a mere child who held the position of second engineer on a Unterseeboote to an actual adult, ready to face the world. My course was further improved by our correspondence over the years. She was pleased when I wed, passed on pleasant congratulations to our children on their mitzvahs, gave me advice when I was lost, and comfort when I grieved over the loss of my wife. When I needed to flee my home, there was only one place to go.”

“Really?” Sherbert looked up, blinking away tears.

“I kept all five letters with her words of encouragement,” said Guttman. “It is only appropriate to return them to her daughter, her ultimate creation.” He reached into his suit pocket and removed several folded sheets of Equestrian paper, faded with age and wear, but with Vernier’s exacting script in neat precise lines.

She let them sit on her lab bench for a week before getting the nerve to open them. It was odd to her perceptions that a human could become a friend, but over the next few weeks of work, he became a near-peer, more than a convenient foil to bounce ideas off. His experience with practical industrial chemistry turned out to have practical applications in her lipid membrane research as well as their impractical primary goal of decryption.

Still, after many weeks of strenuous effort, they had managed to put together a generalized script to test their collection of encrypted messages…

And nothing more.

5. The Imitation Game

Equestria 1939 - Weird World War
The Imitation Game

“Warsaw surrenders to German forces.”
— BBC Radio, September 27, 1939

EX17 = 6793747569390123725
EX17 = ENIGMA Y/N?
RESULT = N
RECOMP Y/N? Y
EN SEED =

"It's impossible!" Sherbert Lemon slammed one hoof down on the table, which made the maze of wires, crystals, and spinning wheels jump. It was supposed to be a draft logical model of the German Enigma machine, or at least able to be configured into whatever they determined was the machine’s final configuration once they had a breakthrough. Herman Guttman had gone back to his apartment for well-needed sleep hours ago, and night was threatening to become day in short order with no more progress than when they had put together the final design and attached it to ACACD for trials.

"Nothing matches up at all and this is the…” Sherbert glanced up through blurry eyes at the chalkboards that stretched across most of the lab, with little space to write more formulas. “How many hundred tests have we run without even a hint of a solution, Mother?"

ACACD and her column of spinning crystal disks did not answer. Over a thousand thin films of pure crystal marked on each side with runes and formulae rotated quietly in their mineral oil bath, making intermittent contacts that caused flickers of light to strobe in patterns against the dark ceiling. Sherbert gave the thaumaturgic mechanism of their test decoder another brief charge of magic, then began to peck out another of many failures on the teletype connected to it, making more characters appear on the paper already scrolling out of the platen, into the overstuffed box, and across the floor;

The discs began to spin more rapidly, making whirls of light spin and dance around the ceiling of the darkened government laboratory while Sherbert rested her horn against the top of the Plexiglas container and wept in frustration. "Come on, mama," she whispered through her tears. "Your baby needs this, mom. I haven't slept in a week. It's just a German toy, not even a tiny fraction as complicated as you are. Oh, horseapples," she muttered as she opened one eye and saw that the CANCEL key on the teletype had gotten nudged, wiping out the seed number she had input before hitting RETURN. "Fifty-seven bucking minutes of runtime blown to toothpicks before I can try the next iteration of—" ignoring the tears beginning to trickle down her cheeks, Sherbert squinted at the darkened chalkboard by flickering hornlight "—eight-hundred and twelve."

She rested her forehead against the cool metal of the device and felt the trickle of tears flow down her face until they vanished into the swirling pools of purified mineral oil in the open reserve tank below. The fluid fed into the thick cylinder of enchanted disks mere millimeters apart while they independently spun, making contacts with other disks until thaumaturgic theory produced an answer that thousands of unicorns flipping thousands of abacuses for thousands of years would be unable to match.

The low thrum of its action was like the heartbeat of the foal she was never going to have, and the tick-tick-tick of the teletype was the cry of an infant, yanking her out of the tranquilized state Sherbert had faded into. She looked at the teletype, then took off her reading glasses with her magic and rubbed her damp eyes.

CALC COMP ENIGMA = ENIGMA
SOLUTION DETERMINED DUP ENIGMA DEVICE WITH SPELL
SOLUTION COMPLETE STOP

Sherbert looked at the teletype paper several times, trying to make sense of the nonsense before wadding it up and throwing it into the burn bin. “Mom. Stupid idea. The only Enigma machine within hundreds of miles is in their submarine out in the harbor, and the Germans guard it like a vault. I might as well be trying to rob a bank.”

The teletype whirred into action again, typing out one line.

CALC COMP SUB = SUB SOLUTION DETERMINED STEAL ENIGMA DUPLICATE RETURN UNDETECTED OBTAIN ROYAL PARDON FOR CRIME SOLUTION COMPLETE STOP

“Mom!” Sherbert was so tired she could have sworn the reflected light from inside ACACD was making star-patterns on the ceiling of her laboratory, swirling and dancing in the darkness. “I’m not going into a life of crime! I don’t even have a submarine!”

Admittedly, it was possible one of her mother’s old acquaintances had a spare submarine hidden somewhere on a volcanic island, but Sherbert was not about to ask any of them, even if she could get permission to visit whatever prisons they were in this week. While she was thinking, the teletype spun into action again and hammered out a line.

RECRUIT AGENT DEEP MANE USE EQ NAVY SUB STOP

The room faded in and out as Sherbert looked at the paper. It was mostly her mother’s fault that she hated enclosed spaces, or at least any that were enclosed more than a laboratory, but sending a spy in a submarine out into the harbor to steal a machine… Was less crazy than anything else they had thought up so far.

“K, mom.” Sherbert rested her head on the desk, trying to fight off the darkness which threatened to overwhelm her willpower. “I’ll suggest it to Prime tomorrow after I sleep.”

Before she could take another breath, the teletype hammered to the end of several lines again, and Sherbert stared at the printout with wide eyes before giving out a hysterical chuckle that just bubbled out from between clenched teeth. "No," she stated quite firmly. "Absolutely not."

GO TO PRIME NOW REPEAT NOW STOP REQUEST PRIORITY NIGHTMARE STOP RECRUIT DEEP MANE FIRST THING AM STOP
SLEEP WITH MAKE FOALS NOT GETTING YOUNGER STOP END

The Manehattan social scene revolved around quite a few humans, mostly because that was as far into Equestria as they were permitted to travel. There had been a few exceptions for exceptional humans over the years, but most human residents who were permanent or temporary residents liked where they were, and did not want to risk sudden eviction to Europe or America by crossing the line. That left influential ponies who wanted to rub metaphorical elbows with influential humans only one place to rub without getting arrested.

With tourism at a low ebb due to the ‘unpleasantness’ in Europe, the reduced population of humans threw themselves even harder into mingling occasions among themselves to socialize and fish for information in fairly equal amounts. Likewise, the ethnicity and national origin of each two-legged attendee was a touchy subject, leaving several parties to abruptly disband when talk turned to the forbidden topic of politics and the inevitable fistfights were about to commence.

Sherbert Lemon had never attended a party that did not involve a birthday cake and several uneasy foals around the punch bowl. Here, they passed the drinks out to anypony walking by. Her first instinct was to finish it off so she could continue her search, only to have the next servant passing by exchange her empty glass for a full one. About the fourth or fifth, she twigged to the concept of carrying the glass without sampling from it, thus preventing endless refills and probably alcohol poisoning.

The only reason she was here was the way Prime had approved her pre-dawn request with a rather cryptic response that she had not understood at all, which roughly paralleled her recent experiences in her lab. He had listened to her request despite the lateness (or earliness) of the hour, instructed her to attend this party, and dismissed her from the office for the few hours remaining before it started so she had no excuse to retreat back to her laboratory and ‘accidentally’ miss her assignment.

The brief nap she managed before the party had been filled with questions, dreams of numbers sweeping her up in an ocean of confusion, and a world that no longer made logical sense. Her alarm clock had not resolved her dilemma, and she was not seeing anypony in the gathering that promised to enlighten her one lux. Thankfully, there was one human she recognized among the dozens, giving her a conversational edge to occupy her time with something other than alcohol consumption.

“Mister John Jacob Astor,” she said, approaching the old gangly man who was holding up a doorway with a drink in his hand. “Our condolences on the recent passing of your wife.”

The tall human nodded his head, but paid her little more attention.

“I read your book,” continued Sherbert. “Despite the obvious errors regarding the planets Jupiter and Saturn, it was… entertaining. I have an annotated copy among my things, if you would care to issue a corrected edition.”

That seemed to draw his attention away from wherever the old man had been. “Beg pardon?” he asked. “I did not catch your name, young miss.”

“Sherbert J Lemon,” she responded. “I already know you. John Astor the Fourth. You funded some of my mother’s projects through a small foundation, although I doubt if you were informed of every little—”

“Lady Voltage,” he said abruptly. “I remember reading that she had a daughter. You have my condolences. Her death was a great loss to the scientific community.”

“Well… Yes.” Sherbert shifted uncomfortably. The drinks were making her tongue thick and the room feel distant, which was a new and novel feeling. That did not make it feel good, but she was unable to maintain her normal aloofness. There was no real way for her to ask a human if there was an Equestrian secret agent at the party, but she had no clue on how to identify Agent Deep Mane other than random chance and time. She settled for an attempt at small talk. “I was born on the day the Titanic sank.”

“Oh.” The human made a small motion with his drink, which Sherbert noticed was nearly full to the rim. “Then you are slightly older than my son, John. Our family owes you Equestrians a substantial debt for our rescue, which I fear may never be repaid.”

“Perhaps when you pay it off, you can purchase another name for your children other than John,” responded Sherbert almost reflexively. At first, she thought it was a horrible gaffe, but the old man hesitated, then chuckled into his hand.

“Perhaps,” he managed from between his fingers. “Equestria has been rather reluctant to export much of its natural wealth, to the great frustration of many people of all nations. Humanity could use a few more prominent people with your kinds of names. Sherbert, for example, and… What does the J stand for?”

“J,” said Sherbert, who had turned to look at an approaching waiter with a tray of drinks floating behind him in a pale yellow magical field. All of the waiters at the party had been well-trained and attentive, but there was something… off about him. For just a flash of an instant, she was certain he was Prime in some sort of disguise, but she had just seen him a few hours ago and it would have taken a week or two in a spa to make him anywhere near this presentable.

The presumed waiter was too attentive, and too subservient, well-dressed in a perfect outfit with exact creases and precise attention to detail, right down to the coal-black jacket that extended over his rear with a multi-petaled flower embroidered on it. He obviously noticed her interest and slowed as he approached, watching her with bright golden eyes instead of the drink floating by her side.

“May I help you, young miss?”

Later, she would spend considerable time doing the equivalent of beating her head against the wall for what she said. But it slipped out anyway. “I need to see you after your task is completed here, Mister Mane.”

“Who?” The yellowish-orange stallion cocked his head to one side. “My name is Orange Bunting, Ma’am. And we’re not supposed to mingle with guests, so if you’ll excuse me.”

And he was gone, weaving through the guests and distributing drinks as he went.

“Do you know that young stallion?” asked Astor.

“I believe so. Excuse me.” It was less of a request than a statement, because you were supposed to ask to be excused from the presence of a superior or royalty. Despite his rank in the human social structure, Sherbert had no need to ask for his leave when she turned and headed for the front door of the mansion, or to acknowledge the relatively unimpressed footman who had examined her credentials carefully when she had entered. She moved with brisk strides, leaving her only a little winded when she reached her destination behind the mansion at the servant’s entrance.

If Sherbert were honest with herself, she would have acknowledged her relative lack of stamina was due to her relative lack of strenuous exercise. The least she could have done during her normal days was go down to Room 14a and run on the exercise wheel for the Psychological Conundrum Department, but there were always experiments to run or formula to calculate. As it was, she barely had time to catch her breath before the door in front of her popped open and a pale blue stallion emerged.

She was expecting the chromatic shift, but it had been carried out so well that she hesitated for a split-second, much the same way he did, although she still managed to get her sentence out first.

“Mister Mane, do you have time to discuss—”

“Beg pardon, young miss,” said the immaculate stallion rapidly with a flicker of his bright blue eyes as he looked for an escape route. “You seem to have me confused for somepony else.”

And he was gone, bolting the few lengths necessary to vanish into the stream of ponies flowing by in the street while Sherbert was still turning around. The several drinks she had ingested recently were having a vigorous dispute with her central nervous system, so there was no way she could chase him down. Admittedly, even if she were sober it would have been a difficult chase, and the last thing a secret agent would want is some crazy mare shouting his name while running through a crowd.

All that was left was for Sherbert to return to her laboratory and face ACACD with her failure, or…

* * *

Manehattan was not that large, or at least compared to human cities. Her hooves were contesting the point. She had walked a considerable portion of the evening, first to the docks where she could see the anchored German submarine at the mooring buoy spaced out a bit from the rest of the ships, then after suitable consideration she went to the top of the Chrystlar building to look at the problem from a different perspective. She stubbornly refused to use the elevator until about half-way up, and after a brief pause at a convenient trash can, continued her ascent to where a bit put into the binoculars allowed her two minutes of overhead observation of the German Type VIIB U-boat in greater detail.

It did not help, so she resumed her nocturnal wanderings around the town without any real concrete goal in mind other than burning off alcohol and thinking. One of her goals was accomplished by the time she got back to her apartment and collapsed into bed, but thought was coming up remarkably empty for a mare who dipped a bucket into that well of knowledge on a daily basis.

The next morning dawned vile and painful with a beam of deadly sunlight punching through her sagging venetian blinds and into her watery eyes. It could have been Celestia’s way of reminding Sherbert of her ongoing failures, but she could only blame herself as she was trapped against the bed in exquisite agony, much like a bug on a pin. For several lifetimes, Sherbert tried to light her horn in order to close the slats, but without avail.

“Here.”

Two Bayer aspirin wrapped in a pale yellow magical field bumped up against her nose, followed by her kitchen lead-crystal tumbler filled with lukewarm water. She took, swallowed, and breathed for a short time before the facts of her circumstance soaked into her hangover-impaired mind.

“Agent Mane?” Sherbert intentionally did not look, because if a secret agent were indeed in her tiny one-bedroom apartment, he probably would not appreciate being examined in detail.

“Sherbert J. Lemon,” said the smooth voice again from behind her. “Daughter of Dr. Vernier Voltage, who passed away several years ago in a most peculiar fashion. Oh, yes. I know about your mother. Well, her current incarnation.” There was a quiet breathing as if the speaker were watching intently to see her reactions. “I understand you are currently employed by Q branch on another fascinating project that I’m not privy to, at all. Why are you looking for me?”

“I found you,” corrected Sherbert quietly. “Prime sent me.”

There was a faint rustling of paper, and a section of teletype printout drifted down in front of her nose with the incriminating order from ACACD and one additional line.

GO TO PRIME NOW REPEAT NOW STOP REQUEST PRIORITY NIGHTMARE STOP RECRUIT DEEP MANE FIRST THING AM STOP
SLEEP WITH MAKE FOALS NOT GETTING YOUNGER STOP END

HOOVES OFF THE HARDWARE MANE STOP

“Well, I suppose my mother sent me first,” said Sherbert through clenched teeth with a sense of deep regret for not feeding that piece of paper into the lab shredder. “Prime gave me authority to read you into my project, provided I don’t tell him anything about it until it’s over.”

“Interesting,” mused the voice. “I’ll check with my superiors. If they approve, I’ll meet with you this evening at your laboratory.”

“And… if they don’t approve?” asked Sherbert through the hammers in her head.

There was a long silence and the feeling of eyes carefully examining her before he continued. “Then I think I’ll see you this evening anyway. Good day, young lady.”

If every tiny noise had not triggered explosive pain in her ears, she never would have been able to hear him slip out the door.

* * *

It was late in the afternoon before Sherbert returned to the lab, only to find Guttman working away on the problem in her absence. He had an impressive sheaf of paper accumulated to one side, and a pencil clenched in his teeth much like an earth pony while he erased an entry, but did not look as if he had come up with any brilliant insights about their task either.

She settled down beside him and began working on an incomplete character matrix, the paper version of a metal rotor marked with letters. It was better than nothing, but just barely.

After a time, measured in painful heartbeats felt just behind her temples, Guttman slid a short piece of teletype printout over to her.

HAVE SHERBERT REPORT ON RECRUITMENT AFTER RECOVERING STOP

“I’m not recovered,” said Sherbert bluntly.

Guttman, being a human of great common sense, merely shrugged his shoulders and returned to integrating the cubic matrix he was currently working on. He reached for the noisy Marchant mechanical calculator at the end of his formula, gave Sherbert an evaluating look, then removed a pill bottle from his vest pocket.

“Aspirin?”

Sherbert started to shake her head, decided that was an exceedingly poor idea, and rasped out, “No, thank you. I don’t need it.”

The teletype spun up to speed and hammered out a brief message.

ARE YOU CERTAIN STOP

Once the echoes had died away, she opened one eye to see Guttman with two aspirin in the palm of one hand and a beaker of tepid water in the other, which she took. Showing significant empathy, the human returned to his quiet pencilwork.

An hour or two passed, slow as tar in winter, but she had gotten a certain distance down the chart by the end and decided it was better to get the confession over with while she felt miserable.

“I spoke with… a pony who Prime said might be useful in this endeavor. He will be visiting this evening.”

“A spy or technical expert?” asked Guttman at once.

“Spy.” Sherbert watched as Guttman stood up, stretched with a few subdued popping noises, and turned for the lab door. “Why are you leaving?”

“I am a technical expert, and it is evening.” He picked up several books and put them in his satchel. “I would only get in the way of any spycraft. I will give you and your gentlecolt friend sufficient time to discuss your relationship before I return first thing in the morning.”

“Gentlecolt?” Sherbert could feel her mane begin to stand on end, and her ears flattened regardless of her wishes to appear impassive while Guttman looked for another book.

“You are the very model of a unicorn technical expert,” he continued while searching. “You cannot lie worth a slug bit, and I have several years of Equestrian experience recognizing your kind of reactions in ways that you probably don’t even recognize yourself. Is he handsome?”

“Yes,” she spluttered. “I think. He was disguised and—”

“Unicorn?”

“Of course! I mean…”

“Intelligent?”

“Too much,” she snapped. “He broke into my lab while you were out. Rummaged through our stuff.”

“Und took the book on Platiski’s Disc Connections,” Guttman added with one last look around. Sherbert had to follow suit, and noticed several other books missing as well.

“A spy and a thief,” muttered Sherbert.

“Think about naming one of the foals Agustus,” Guttman said as he opened the door to leave, only to step sideways when confronted by a bearded unicorn janitor outside with a trash cart.

“You’s a secure laboratory, right?” he asked, looking at a clipboard held in his pale blue magic. “We gots a burn bag if’n you got trash.”

“No, we’re fine,” said Guttman, giving a glance over his shoulder. “Sherbert?”

She did not say anything at first, which made Guttman hesitate. “Spy?” he asked.

“Spy,” she said.

“Bye,” he responded, heading down the corridor and back to his apartment for the evening.

Sherbert eyed the ‘janitor’ suspiciously.

“Hi,” he said in a completely different voice. “May I come in?”

“Again?” she asked. “Could I stop you if I wanted, Agent Mane?”

“Do you want to?” he asked right back at her, peeling the beard off and sticking it into one of the pockets in his coveralls.

She opened the door the rest of the way, then closed it after he strolled inside and made himself comfortable on a lab stool with a canapé that she swore she had last seen on a tray at the party.

“Have you decided to help me?” Sherbert opened the lab refrigerator and pushed several chemical experiments to one side so she could get out some leftovers. “The cafeteria had spinach casserole yesterday. Would you like some?”

“A bribe?” The unknown stallion swept up the glass container and peered inside before picking up the fork Sherbert floated over to him.

“Food. Since you’re stealing snacks from parties, and you’re still skinny, you burn a lot of calories. I’ve never seen you slow down, so you don’t eat right.” Sherbert paused, then closed her eyes. “I’m turning into my mother. Or my brother.”

Mane did not answer right away because he was chewing.

“Obviously, you’re not a changeling,” mused Sherbert mostly to herself.

“Why not?” asked Mane, scooping up one of the last forkfuls of spinach casserole.

“The casserole is laced with a poison deadly to changelings.”

Mane stopped chewing for a moment. “Really?”

“No, I just wanted to see if you were a changeling with the way you change identities so quickly.”

The stallion paused, then deliberately put his fork into the depleted casserole, removed the last bite, and finished it off with a wry look. Once he had finished chewing and swallowing, he added, “You’re a dangerous mare. Are you sure you don’t want to go into the spy business?”

“Do spies ever learn what it is they are stealing or taking photos of?” she retorted. “I do. I am a scientist. I take puzzles of life and chemistry, break them down, and solve them. I receive answers to my questions.”

Mane regarded the empty casserole bowl for a long time without putting it into the sink. “Sometimes, you don’t want to know. Root Stock was a friend of yours, yes?”

“We are scientific colleagues,” admitted Sherbert, puzzled over the sudden change of conversational direction.

“Then someday I may tell you,” he continued cryptically. “My career as a European spy is fairly well over for the time being. Perhaps I’ll go back when things calm down, or go into the theatre instead. But for now, you’ve seduced me with your gourmet meal—” he put the empty glass bowl and fork into the sink where it belonged “—and feminine wiles. Agent J has a nice ring to it, I suppose. What secret mission are you recruiting me for?”

6. Sunk Costs

Equestria 1939 - Weird World War
Sunk Costs

Lt. Herbert Schultze, commander of a German U-boat, who claimed to have sunk the British freighter Firby and to have advised Winston Churchill of his action, denied Thursday night in a trans-Atlantic radio interview that he had been captured.
— St. Petersburg Times, September 30, 1939

“I pictured something a little more… seaworthy,” admitted Sherbert. “And vaguely like the Nautilus, not a cargo barge.”

There had been little shiny spy gear or secret agent passwords involved in their trip to the harbor and the Equestrian Navy’s secret submarine pen. There had been a long walk where Agent Mane had talked with her, mostly about their upbringing and education, but with some of his life stories in return. And stories was the operative word, because he could not have lived half of them without being an old stallion with a grey beard and a peg leg or two.

The metal door at the fishing boat mooring had declared “Barnacles Boat Repairs” in faded letters, with a tattered bankruptcy notice from the Third National Bank of Manehattan pasted across it, threatening legal action if any equipment inside was removed without their permission. Unlike the rusty door, the lock was lubricated and heavy, but yielded to Mane’s quick attention even without a key, and a steel grate beyond likeways proved no real obstacle to their quest.

The dirty barge floating in the dark chamber… was nothing like what Sherbert expected. There were probably a hundred just like it in the harbor and traveling up the river, utilitarian and plain with a galvanized steel frame and a tiny shelter-hut in the center. This one had an outboard Briggs and Stratton petrol engine on the rear, probably just strong enough to drive the whole contraption at less than walking speed across the placid waters of the Manehattan harbor.

“Behold, Tinkles. It’s between projects right now,” said Mane. “The main body is formed out of the ballast tanks of the U-33. They housed it in the boathouse here until somepony comes up with another hairbrained scheme. The last one was a doozy. They wanted the U-49 out in the harbor to fire a torpedo at a target, use Tinkles to capture the torpedo en route, and fake an explosion at the other end so the torpedo could be analyzed. Thankfully, sanity triumphed and the project was canceled.”

“I could never duplicate a torpedo,” said Sherbert, still looking at the barge but with a different perspective. “So the secret experimental submarine is under the barge?”

Mane nodded, picking his way carefully down the gangplank until his hooves clattered on the rust-stained teak decking. “The boathouse has an unusually deep draft and a set of waterproof doors that can be installed at the mouth when they want to make modifications to Tinkles. Just pump out the water, go to town for a few weeks with a welder, and push the barge out when you’re done. Preferably in the evening so nopony notices a dark shadow under it. She’s got a perfect record; been used a dozen or more times without a success.”

He opened the wooden trap door in the middle of the barge and peered downward into what was presumably a concealed submarine, size small. Sherbert was perfectly comfortable on the solid wood of the dock. All of her old phobias about closed spaces and drowning began to flupper upwards in the back of her mind, made worse by the way Mane looked back in her direction and waved.

“Come on. It’s safe as houses. They bolted Tinkles to the barge since they took the engines out.”

It was a good excuse, and Sherbert was more than happy to take it. “Without engines, it would be useless for our purposes. There is no need for us to explore.”

“Us?” Mane blinked several times in the dim lighting. “I was going to stay up here while you checked out whatever you needed to see.”

“I would rather stay up here while you crawled down into that… thing,” managed Sherbert. She took several short breaths before fixing him with a questioning glance. “You’re afraid of the dark?”

“Enclosed spaces,” admitted Mane reluctantly. He met her eyes and added, “You too?”

“Mother attempted to train it out of me with a small compression chamber,” said Sherbert in short, sharp words. “It failed.”

At first, it looked as if Mane was going to keep silent on the rather unpleasant foalhood memories, but eventually he asked, “How old were you?”

“Two.”

“Ah.” Then after a moment, “I understand.” After considerably longer, the grey stallion continued, “If you accompany me, I shall eschew the tradition of ladies first.”

She did.

It was not as bad as Sherbert feared, particularly with company. Admittedly, it was cramped, dark, and stuffy, but the ventilation system whirred to life in short order, a row of dim lights cast a shadowless illumination over the controls, and being where she rubbed coats up against an unrelated male of the species was… different. It was also the first time a male unicorn had not either attempted to ‘put the moves’ on her or find an excuse to abruptly leave.

One thing for absolute certain. Mane knew about Tinkles for some time, although he couched all the stories about the submarine’s journeys in third-pony terms, showing he had not actually been present for any of them.

He also knew each dial and lever, not just because they were labeled, but he had undoubtedly studied the manual already. Project Steal An Encryption Machine would have been a fair match for their transportation, but without an engine at the rear of the vessel to move it forward, there was no need to go up or down, and that eliminated the need for nearly every widget and the whole purpose of them ‘borrowing’ it for the trip. There was a fairly fearsome set of manuals stored in the tiny conning tower, but she did little but flip through several of the chapters and make a quiet comment about how she recognized the writing style before pushing the whole lump back into the cabinet.

“I fail to see the utility of this vehicle in attaining our goal,” she said. “And as a lady, I’m getting out first.”

Mane was right behind her, closing and latching the hatch with obvious relief, which she understood in absolute terms. “Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way,” he mussed while sitting on the teak flooring of the barge and catching his breath.

Sherbert gave a short huff of breath at the inherent humor of the statement. “What, do you think we should just walk up to U-49 and ask them to give us a tour?”

* * *

“Captain Goßler,” said the middle-age pony with a sharp fedora, who held a hoof out to shake. “Toll Docket here. It is goot that you made time for us on such short notice. This is my assistant, Miss Beaker. May we continue this conversation in private, sir?”

“Of course, of course,” said the captain in a comforting voice. “Away from prying eyes like it said in the note.”

Sherbert stepped from the wobbling harbor boat to the slippery steel deck of the submarine with a great deal of care, ignoring the way that Agent Mane merely scrambled up the ladder and vanished into the conning tower like a pony half his apparent age. Somehow, the spy had managed to tint his coat in a dark blue shade with white ‘frosting’ like he was far older, along with yellowing spats on each hoof and a distinct squint. Sherbert was disguised as… Well, herself with a different name and a clipboard, along with a full-length skirt embroidered in a beaker pattern.

She slipped on the ladder several times, eventually gaining the assistance of an armed German sailor for the precarious task of entering the conning tower without crashing into the interior of the control room beyond. Maneuvering in the human-designed contraption required so much concentration that she nearly forgot how frightened enclosed spaces made her, or at least until she had a moment to think about it with all four hooves on the deck.

“...seems unacceptably designed for a taller species and no way to correct without a full reconstruction effort, although unicorns might be able to compensate for most of the misplaced controls. Miss Beaker, take a note of that.”

The clipboard floated over to Sherbert in Mane’s lime-green aura, yet another part of his changing behavior that kept her off-balance. She took it, made note of his observations in Equestrian, and focused on her surroundings instead of the crushing sense of despair filling her chest at the thought of being inside a steel tube.

It provided good incentive to keep alert and silent while the captain took the faux ‘Ministry official’ on a tour of the skinny vessel, from forward torpedo room to the quiet engines and sealed batteries like he was selling some used wagon instead of responding to a ‘secret plea’ from an unnamed agency inside of the Equestrian government looking into the possibility of purchasing several German U-boats for ‘coastal defense.’ Of course that would involve training crews, provided they could find any hypothetical ponies willing to endure long periods of time inside an underwater steel tube.

Memories of her mother’s failed attempt to suppress her fears kept attempting to poke up through the blanket of duty. The idea that mere humans could spend days underwater in this steel deathtrap was unthinkable. But yet, they did. So she could too. For a time. Provided she concentrated every tiny bit of her vast mind on examining her surroundings, much as if her mother was going to quiz her on it when she returned.

It really was an accident when Sherbert tried a door that Captan Goßler had passed by on their tour, and ‘Toll Docket’ had likewise ignored while carrying on their conversation. The click of the locked door drew the captain’s attention like a lodestone, and it looked for a moment like he was going to draw his sidearm like the other two sailors in the control room.

“Miss Beaker!” he snapped. “That room is off-limits.”

“Sorry!” Sherbert cringed back and cowered, made much easier by the fear she was suppressing, and the excuse came naturally to her voice. “I gotta pee. Isn’t this the bathroom?”

“It’s the radio room, not the head,” said the captain with a scowl, although he glanced at Toll Docket who was regarding the door with considerable disdain.

“Well, I suppose if that area is as unsuitable for pony use as the rest of this facility, there’s no need to examine it. Come, Beaker. Let us be off.”

“Wait.” The captain reached into his pocket for a key, which he reluctantly used to unlock the heavy hatch to the radio room. “You can look, but do not enter.”

“Huh.” Toll leaned in and took a few disinterested glances, then took a few steps back. “Nothing of interest, and only marginally suitable for ponies. What is your opinion, Beaker?”

It felt strange to see the locked cabinet where the decoding machine was certainly stored, merely a meter or so away. If she had the time, privacy, a key to open the cabinet, and enough raw materials, she could create a copy of the machine with her special spell. Without any of those, all she could do was look around the room and make note of the way submarines utilized every single centimeter of space, even to using the curved section of hull as a place to store German flags.

“You can’t even turn around in there,” she managed as a criticism, which was more valid than she would like to admit. The only way to get two ponies in the room was if one of them curled up under the minimalist desk and the other took shallow breaths. Despite the close quarters, it was decorated in classic German style with a few tiny photographs of supposed family and a great deal of locked filing space for paperwork and maps, all labeled in exhaustive detail. Even the cabinet the encryption device was concealed inside had a tidy label and a metallic lump with a pull-pin that undoubtedly was the trigger to some sort of destruction device like a thermite grenade.

“Our radio operator is quite fit,” said Captan Goßler as he ensured there were no leftover pony parts inside before closing the door and locking it. “A great deal of engineering expertise has been used to maximize efficiency in our operations. We do not run a cruise ship, Herr Doket. Perhaps you would be wise to allow more of our vessels into your port, crewed by good German sailors.”

“If they are all as mechanically deficient as this one, we would have to build several drydocks,” responded Toll Docket with an arrogant sniff. “It has been over several months, and your mechanics have not completed the repairs which caused you to take refuge here. It allows your lecherous sailors free reign over our fair city with nothing in return. Trust is an exchange, Captan Goßler. The Reich has provided little but promises in that regard, despite Equestrian assistance in your scientific endeavors. Our government is displeased with your recent expansionist tendencies. Several vessels of a type we are unable to build ourselves would do well to assuage such deficiencies, but every scrap of German steel available has been pressed into service in this foolhardy assault upon Poland. If not for our distance from the conflict, one might think Germany would prefer to enlist us into your conflict regardless of longstanding Equestrian neutrality.”

“Never,” said the German captain with a frustrated huff and a distinct lack of sincerity, or at least that is what Sherbert could determine by close examination of his other physical cues.

She was acutely aware of other ponies’ reactions to stimuli, which was why she had never been invited back to the office poker game after only one session. It was also a reason for her frustration with Agent Mane, who had settled into his role as a fictional government executive with far too much skill. It contrasted horribly against her own stumbling around in the close quarters of the human submersible, jarred against the cool coat of Agent Mane and the starched trousers of the German captain and security guards in equal proportions. When she finally made it to open air, free of the suffocating heat of the steel culvert, she lunged awkwardly in the direction of the waiting harbor boat and managed to only hit the harbor instead.

She never had learned how to swim, but there was good incentive at the moment, and she paddled for all that she was worth until her companion made it down into the waiting boat.

“Beaker!” he chastised, lighting his horn and getting Sherbert’s nose above water. Although he did not seem strong enough to lift her entire weight, it allowed her to breathe long enough to reach the edge of the boat. At that point, the eager young pilot promptly reached down, got a good grip on her foreleg with both hands, and pulled her the rest of the way onboard.

“Careful, Mum,” the human child cautioned. “Yer not wearin’ rubbers, an’ there’s nae a grip with steel shoes on that.” He reached one hand into the harbor, fished out the clipboard she had been working on, and gave it a shake, watching the water stream off it.

“Just give it a toss and get us back to shore,” snapped Toll Docket. “It’s worthless, just like this trip.”

It was a little out of character for Agent Mane, and it made Sherbert push her own pending panic into the back of her mind, despite being soaking-wet, pinched in horribly uncomfortable places by the damp dress, and bitter at her failures. She wanted to stomp until she knocked a hole in the bottom of the chugging harborboat, but that would not be a productive use of her time or effort, so she shut up, held still, and followed Mane once they got off the boat.

“Cab,” snapped Mane once they reached the street.

“Fourteenth and Elm Slough road,” he snapped to the cab driver.

“Goodbye,” he snapped when they reached their destination and climbed down from the hansom cab.

Sherbert had found herself stuck with the task of paying for their transportation, first for the human child who drove the harbor shuttle, then the squat earth pony pulling the cab. She did not want to be left behind, but had to practically gallop to catch Mane before he went into a nearby apartment building. Once again, she found herself wanting to call out to him but restrained by the practicality of shouting at a secret agent during whatever secret thing he might be doing.

Such practicality only lasted until he reached a second-floor apartment and practically walked into the closed door with his horn lit and the lock giving little sparks.

“Mane,” she hissed under her breath. “What are you—”

The lock faded in and out, then rotated sharply and the apartment door fairly popped open from his weight.

“Gohome,” he hissed over his shoulder as he fell into the room, but Sherbert was having none of it and stayed right on his heels while he scrambled to his hooves, then darted across the small apartment and under the kitchen table. At that point, she could not follow because when she looked, there was nothing under the table but a ventilation grate, and no Mane to be seen.

* * *

Dawn found thin rays of light forcing their reluctant way through the slats of the window shades, casting Mane’s apartment in parallel lines of shadow. A faint click sounded from under the kitchen table, then nothing.

“I’m still here,” said Sherbert Lemon, bent over the kitchen table with the vial of graphite powder held in the crook of her fetlock like an earth pony. She sprinkled gently over the paper and blew, letting the dust settle into the lines of magic she had drawn, then gave a gentle push that made the paper smell of damp wax and roses.

“I thought I told you to go home,” came a rough voice from under the table that only vaguely resembled Mane’s throaty tenor. Not getting any response other than rustling paper, Agent Mane’s nose eventually poked out into the still air, followed by the rest of his head in due time. “Why am I inside a submarine?” he asked.

Sheets of paper draped up and down the apartment corridor, attached to each other with cellophane tape and stuck to the walls with tacks. On them were line drawings and sketches of pipes, gauges, valves, and the various bits and pieces that made up the innards of a Type VIIB German submarine, diagramed out with Sherbert’s exquisite attention to detail, although at a smaller scale than the real sub out in the harbor.

“It wouldn’t fit inside the apartment otherwise,” said Sherbert as an answer to Mane’s obvious question. “Quarter-scale mostly, although the head is full scale so you can still use your toilet, and a section of the aft torpedo room is scaled at half for your bedroom.”

The spy observed the sheets of paper draped across his home for a long time, then moved slowly into the kitchen and got a cup out of the cabinet.

“I made coffee,” said Sherbert.

Mane upended the percolator over his cup and waited. After a few seconds, an inky lump dropped into it.

“It may be a little strong,” she admitted before returning to her work.

A certain amount of thumping and clunking came from the kitchen, slow at first but speeding up to a reasonable pace. Sherbert refused to allow it to distract her since she was nearly done, and produced her last paper as Mane shuffled back into her view with a pair of coffee cups following him.

“Have you ever made coffee before?” he asked, putting the other cup in front of her. “No, skip that. You’re still alive, so obviously not. You don’t fill the basket. You dump out the old grounds and the cold coffee, put in a few scoops of fresh, and… Nevermind. Is there a purpose to turning my home into a Navy art show?”

“We have an uncompleted task. Since we are unable to complete it from the theoretical end, we will just have to apply our skills to completing it from the practical end.”

“I’m a spy, not a proctologist,” said Mane, sipping on his coffee. “Or a submariner. Thankfully.”

“That much is obvious, from yesterday.” Sherbert swallowed. “I’ve been working on a plan.”

Mane gave out a grunt and headed for the bathroom. After sufficient time to perform his morning ablutions, he came back into the kitchen, looking far more equine.

“Were you planning on breaking into the submarine by way of the back hatch, sneaking to the radio room, copying the machine, and retracing your steps?”

She carefully used the tape dispenser to connect two sheets of paper. “Maybe,” she admitted.

“Sleeping gas, I presume. Some sort of gadget to let you work your way through the submarine once you have gained access,” he said. “Something to unlock the radio room door, the cabinet it is stored in, disarm the thermite destruct device attached to it, perhaps with a mind-affecting device to make the sailors all forget their most memorable Equestrian experience… Did I miss anything?”

Sherbert continued to apply tape.

“You can’t teleport into the radio room, because you can’t see your destination,” he continued. “That would be the easy solution.”

“Unfortunately, submarines are made of steel, not glass.” She hesitated with a piece of cellophane tape hovering in her magic field. “How much can you make transparent with your spell?”

“What?” Mane continued to nonchalantly sip his coffee, but Sherbert was having none of that.

“You don’t use keys. You used a spell to make your apartment lock transparent,” she said. “You’re very proficient with it, although I should have noticed the way you went through the locks at the submarine storage facility. Unicorn magic normally can’t affect hidden objects like lock pins very well, but you almost did not break stride.”

“I really have no idea what you are—”

“I can’t teleport,” she continued, “but you know about it, which combined with your natural talent… As a spy, no locked door would obstruct you. Even walls. Make it transparent to see your destination, teleport to the other side, and you can browse through any documents or secret items at your leisure.”

“I still don’t see—”

“You are correct. My plan sucks, but the radio room is mostly below the waterline of the submarine, which requires you and the Equestrian submarine for a higher probability of success.”

“It won’t work,” said Mane bluntly. “Tinkles doesn’t have any engines, and even if we could tow it over to the U-49 and I could teleport inside, which I’m not saying I could, teleportation takes a lot out of me. I can’t take you with me.”

“It would take four trips then,” said Sherbert. “In, grab the machine, out, I copy it, you take the original back in, and teleport back out.”

“And I collapse and die on the spot,” said Mane.

“A noble sacrifice for Equestria,” said Sherbert.

There was a brief silence, then Mane cocked his head slightly to one side. “You made a funny.”

“Did I?”

Mane took longer to consider this time. “You’re dangerous,” he pronounced as if it were a serious accusation.

“True.” She raised one eyebrow. “Didn’t your mother warn you about mares like me?”

The moment the words left her mouth, she knew that bit of attempted humor was exactly the wrong thing to say. Mane did not obviously react, but there were enough small motions and shifts in weight to indicate he was hurt deeply by her quip. She moved to put her body between Mane and the kitchen table, sat her rump down on the floor, and quietly asked, “I said something wrong. How do I apologize?”

“Flowers,” said Mane in what seemed to be a stunned reflex. “Dinner and dancing, normally. Are you that ill-prepared to engage socially with another sapient being?”

“Chemical reactions in non-laboratory conditions are by nature erratic and unpredictable,” said Sherbert. “I normally lock myself in the lab during this time, but the task seemed important enough to… Hormones,” she added. “Skip it. I will go to my laboratory and return in a week. Goodbye.”

It was Mane’s turn to get in front of her, scrambling to reach the apartment door first and face her with a rather conflicted expression. He stood there for a time, head lowered with horn glimmering lightly, then took a single sniff.

“Oh,” he said quietly. “Hormones forced upon a rational pony. You poor thing.”

“And you,” growled Sherbert as some of those hormones triggered a response somewhere deep in her guts. “A coward, more afraid of the dark places beneath the earth than—”

“A week may be too late,” said Mane. “With everything happening in Europe, the U-49 could set sail at any time. Their engines are repaired, despite their claims. And another thing. This way.”

He turned sharply to one side and strode into the bathroom, with Sherbert following regardless of her wishes, and remaining silent as he studied her sketches of the aft torpedo room.

“There.” He pointed. “That is not a German G7a torpedo. Nor is that one. The welds are all wrong, and there are seams which seem to indicate doors.”

“Why would anybody put doors on a torpedo?” she mused.

“Unless to access what is stored inside,” said Mane. “The Royal Guard required a search of the submarine when it first took refuge in our harbor. They took particular care examining the six supply containers the Type Seven-B submarines carry below the main deck and outside the pressure hull, but found nothing suspicious. Therefore, they may have been less alert inside the hull when examining sealed tubes supposedly full of explosives and flammable fuel. Hiding weapons inside false torpedo casings would be a clever method of deflecting the inevitable search. And recently, Italian weapons have been showing up in Manehattan, carried by the wrong ponies. Criminals. Partisans. Rebels.”

“Since you know about it, most of these undesirables are undoubtedly in the pay of Celestia.”

“Not all.” Mane tapped the paper. “Spies and double-agents are thick as fleas in town representing socialists, fascists, revolutionaries, and anarchists. Until now, we had few clues as to where the weapons were coming from. If nothing else, our little stage play yielded one good thing. Other than an afternoon spent in pleasant company.”

Sherbert could not decide if she wanted to smile or scowl. She settled for a sharp retort. “You just want under my tail while I’m weakened.”

“Eh…” Natural expressions did not seem to belong on his face, but Mane had a delightful frustrated grimace. “It is… delightful to have someone to match wits against. There’s only one brilliant mare who I trust, and she lives in a golden castle on a mountain. I’ve done many things in her service, seduced others, killed. Once. She did not go with me into that steel tomb. She did not give me the courage to face my fears. She does not face the same demons that plague my nightmares.”

“And now Celestia sets us both upon the same impossible task,” continued Sherbert, “which makes you doubt in your abilities. You’ve used sex to control others, so you seek to use your familiar patterns in unfamiliar circumstances.”

“And you hesitate to fling yourself into unknown reactions,” countered Mane. “How do you expect to learn, if you do not try? And not your crazy plan. It’s impossible.”

“Impossible?” Sherbert turned away, striding into the kitchen and retrieving the manual typewriter she had been using to make notes. She walked just as briskly back to the bathroom, opened the door, and tossed it inside. “There. We’ve got a door, a device, and a dimwit. Teleport inside, retrieve the device, and go from there.”

“You’re mad.”

“I’m angry,” snapped Sherbert. “I’m an angry scientist, and this is an experiment.” She lowered her horn. “Try me. Or would you like a different kind of experiment. One involving random transformation of your liped membranes into something unpleasant.”

“You are mad.”

“Like my mother,” snapped Sherbert. “Now move!”

A section of the door became transparent, and Mane vanished in a silent burst of light. Sherbert waited for a time, then asked, “Are you injured?”

“About pissed myself,” said Mane from behind the door. “Give me a moment, scary lady.”

Once they were done, Sherbert considered her experiment a success. Her experimental subject survived, although exhausted. With sufficient materials, she was able to replicate the primary functions of the mechanical typewriter in a rather ugly but serviceable fashion, although she was also exhausted. The only thing remaining was the process of getting the Equestrian submarine to the German submarine, which still eluded her.

However, there was one pony who should know how to accomplish that task.

7. Now You See It

Equestria 1939 - Weird World War
Now You See It

“Even if Herr Hitler's proposals were more closely defined and contained suggestions to right these wrongs, it would still be necessary to ask by what practical means the German Government intends to convince the world that aggression will cease and that pledges will be kept. Past experience has shown that no reliance can be placed upon the promises of the present German Government.”

— Nevile Chamberlain speech to Parliament, October 12, 1939

“Mother would have approved.” Sherbert Lemon eyed what her brother had done to the barge, only to have Agent Mane spoil the moment.

“Your mother was mad.” The stallion, who was currently a light brown with an auburn mane, clunked across the teak flooring of the barge and examined one of the banners proclaiming ‘Poland Liberated’ in brilliant German letters. That glowed. Orange. “And won’t Prince Blueblood be a little upset at billing this… celebration in his name?”

“Blueblood still loves the rat bastards,” said Mixed State. “If there were any justice in this world, he would have been vacationing in Poland when this whole thing broke out. Then again, they were more than happy to provide for his every desire when he visited—”

“So he’s a fat-headed fool,” said Mane. “No surprise.” The spy looked around the barge, poking into corners and paying particular attention to the records next to the turntable. “Dance music? You’re going to distract the Germans with a music barge?”

“Party pony barge. The girls—human and ponies—will meet us at the docks,” said Mixed. “Most of the submarine crew will be back from shore leave, since they’re being kept on a short leash. We’ll be taking on other supplies there. Enough booze to float the sub, every party girl who will fit on the barge, and the whole mess billed to Blueblood. I really want to know why you want the barge and Tinkles specifically moored where you told me, but there is no way I’m going to ask.”

“I would not tell you anyway,” said Sherbert. She eyed the elaborate structure surrounding the trap door leading down into the steel tube of Tinkles, with colorful lights disguising its purpose and a big ‘Deutschland über alles’ banner to act as further concealment.

“It must be important if you’re facing up to your claustrophobia,” continued Mix. “Just you and your handsome coltfriend, all alone in Tinkles. Seems to be a lot of work just to get a hotel room.”

“She’s a screamer,” said Mane blandly before vanishing down the trap door. Mixed State watched him descend, then gave a short glance at his simmering half-sister.

“Sorry, Sis. I don’t own a shovel,” he said.

As much as she wanted to snipe at Mix, Sherbert followed the spy into the infernal submarine.

Killing them both would wait until after the mission was over. And she did not need a shovel. The ocean was large.

* * *

“Sound travels.”

Sherbert turned a page on the submarine manual she was trying to read and gave her fellow prisoner a flat glance across the bridge. Agent Mane had retrieved one of the mattresses from the berthing area and put it on the deck so he had a place to pace without the clunk-clunk-clunk of iron shoes on decking. As much as Sherbert wanted to join him, or even run up the conning tower stairs and fling herself into open air, she restrained her base primitive urges.

“I pace when I’m nervous,” he said back in a near hiss. “Besides, there’s enough noise up there—” he jerked his horn in an upward direction where a few dozen human females were dancing to the tune of some negro jazz musician on the phonograph “—that nopony is going to hear me tramping on a cushion down here.”

“You’re not helping me concentrate. Maybe we should try something different.” She pushed the manual to one side and looked Agent Mane in the eyes. “Seduce me.”

“What?” Mane abruptly stopped walking in place and just stared. “Here?”

“Of course.” Sherbert combed back a piece of her mane that kept trying to break free. It had escaped her last trip to the barber and constantly mocked her in the mirror. She would have cut it back to match the rest of her manestyle, but there had always been something more important that kept coming up whenever she looked for a pair of scissors. “You are a spy. You are most comfortable in a crowd, seducing mares of all types, even humans. In order for you to remain cognisant, I offer my assistance in the form of a distraction. I trust it will not be too unpleasant for me, and should prove informative in the event I wish to carry on a personal relationship in the future.”

Mane simply remained staring and did not say a word.

“I see.” Sherbert retrieved the submarine operating manual and returned to her studies.

“No, it’s not that,” said Mane in a hurry, although he had stopped pacing and began looking more normal. “Well, maybe a little that. It’s just… I’ve never heard romance being considered in such unromantic terms.”

“Now you will tell me there is ‘romance’ in your spying activities, I presume,” said Sherbert coldly.

“Well… True,” admitted Mane very slowly, as if the words were being pulled from some deep well that required a great deal of labor to dredge to the surface. “At work, I’m trying to take advantage of a young lady’s attentions in order to gain leverage over some other factor, like her access to secret papers. I’ve just never seen you as a mare I want to take advantage of.”

Sherbert diverted her attention from a fascinating section on ballast and trim in order to favor him with a brief glance.

“I should have phrased that better,” he said with his face frozen in a rictus that looked very much as if he were smiling at gunpoint, and just heard the click of a safety being removed.

“You should have a more believable face when lying,” said Sherbert, although she did not return to reading.

“You think I’m lying?” Mane cocked his head slightly to one side and settled down on the mattress like an uneasy pheasant ready to burst off his nest at the first sign of a fox. She tried to return to her manual, but gave it up as a lost cause after a few minutes of relative silence.

“This is the point where you make an unrequested admission of your weakness,” said Sherbert. “Something tragic and sufficiently similar to my own situation that I will empathize with you and become more suitable for manipulation.”

“You mean like my father beating me?” said Mane. “Or my mother running away from him when I was young, because he beat her too. Human-Equestrian relationships are always chancy. I think my mother only took up with him because the Great War threw the whole country into chaos. My real father was a pony and noted monarchist when the Weimar Republic was formed, so he got out of Germany one step ahead of prison. That left her alone with nopony to protect her. So she made a particularly bad decision to trust a human.”

The manual suddenly seemed far less interesting to Sherbert, and she began to feel the nagging sensation that this was the first honest thing the spy had told her. “Your mother was in a relationship with a human?”

“After I was born, of course.” Mane gave a subdued snort. “You were born on the same day a ship sank. I was born under Halley’s comet. Marcus Manilius called them signs of chaos and destruction. A little more meaningful than a leakey iron tub, I would think.”

“You would have me believe a spy is familiar with the works of ancient scientists?” Sherbert pushed the manual to one side. “Prove it.”

“Why?” Mane turned his head away. “I was read to sleep in Latin, Andromeda and Persius filled my dreams, ancient philosophers and poets occupied my days. My fellow students were struggling with addition and subtraction while I was sketching τετρακτύς in the margins of my textbooks.”

“A needed baseline education for a career of misleading young females of whatever species,” said Sherbert flatly. “Where did this mythical mother go after she fled?”

“Equestria.”

He made no more attempts to distract Sherbert, but she was curious enough about his fictional story to ask, “And you never tried to find her again? As a spy, I would think—”

“She can go straight to Tartarus,” growled Mane in what was a dramatic shift from his normal chirpy quips. “I never want to see her again. She left me with that beast in the middle of Germany being looted. Treaty my ass. It was a license to rob and murder. Trains packed to the top with books, machines hauled away. Men being marched off to ‘volunteer’ for assignments in other countries while their starving wives and children cried in the ditches. He tried to sell me for some potatoes. I ran.”

“Ran,” said Sherbert.

“Ran,” confirmed Mane. “Forged documents, and don’t look at me in that way. I had the copy spell perfected even at that age. I could even forge Deutschmarks, but that was no great task since they were printing them on toilet paper by then. It still paid my way out. Wound up in Haarlem. The Netherlands was far better than what I escaped. All the tulips a young pony willing to run errands for loose change could eat.”

“They’re toxic,” started Sherbert before catching herself.

“Really?” Mane shifted uncomfortably on the loose mattress. “Never would have guessed until the doctor told me. Took me in, once I got better and stopped crapping all over the floor. Ran errands for him. Got to the point where I could talk to humans again without hating them. Well, not too much. Hid it well. Studied. Considered medicine, but there were no Dutch schools who would touch a unicorn. Besides, my Mark didn’t really point me in the direction of social interaction.”

Sherbert’s eyes wandered to the stallion’s uncovered flanks and the rather odd scribble they showed. “Certainly, not the art world. I presume that is supposed to be a ghost.”

Mane pulled his tail closer to his body. “I was young, and had little artistic talent.”

“Your talent seems to be targeted on avoiding attention. If this succeeds—”

“Then this kind of skulking about will never acquire us fame either. That is perfectly fine with me.” Tinkles took that moment to shudder slightly with a loud thump as the barge moored to the German submarine, or at least that was the plan at this point in time. Sherbert’s stomach lurched with the impact, but Mane practically jumped, then curled up again in a tight ball.

“The plan says to give them a half-hour before our raid,” said Sherbert redundantly, since she was the one who had written out their schedule. After a quick check of her watch, a gift from her own father on her fourth birthday and promptly disassembled out of curiosity, she returned to the submarine manuals. The watch displayed at least a vague approximation of the current time, with monthly maintenance and adjustment, and she had to wonder just how much of the submarine had similar issues. At least it could not sink much since the bottom of the harbor was barely dredged out enough for the cruise liners, and the sub was bolted very solidly to the barge, which she had checked during the first visit. Twice. To think that humans could set out into the infinite sea in tiny steel coffins like this one…

She scooted more closely to Mane in order to provide him some moral support, since he seemed so stressed. There was a shock absorber poking out of Tinkles’ front end that pressed up against the German submarine’s hull next to the radio room, so the sounds of a busy bunch of humans echoed faintly through their relative silence by way of direct conduction. It gave Sherbert a sense of the outside world and felt less like being trapped in a pressure chamber until Mane whispered one terrible sentence.

“It won’t work, you know.”

“What won’t?” she responded, quietly so there would be no chance of being heard up above or inside the other submarine.

“Enigma, of course.” Mane peered out at her from where his nose was buried in his tail. “It’s a symmetric cypher so the same key is used for encryption as decryption. That’s its only weakness, but the temporary fixed keyset domain changes frequently enough that even if you have a machine with one known keyset, it becomes useless in a few hours. Even copying their code sequences only gets you those particular days for that particular machine.”

Sherbert said nothing. She merely looked at him and blinked several times.

“I did some reading,” he explained.

“ACACD and I will take the machine and whatever codebooks they have to decrypt all their recent communications and any in the near future,” said Sherbert carefully. “Using common phrase analysis, we will extend our ability to decrypt other messages in turn. Duplicating the machine and the codebooks is only the most difficult step, which must take place before any of the others. The design of the device is roughly derivable from existing known devices, but exact configurations and codes are needed to start the process of understanding the theory behind it.”

“Like spying,” said Mane, still unmoving. “The first ninety percent of a problem takes ninety percent of the effort. The last ten percent takes the remaining ninety percent of work, at best.” He shuddered. “What if I can’t do it?”

“If you are trapped in the other submarine, I suspect the Germans will kill you,” said Sherbert. “They will immediately suspect this vessel as your source, search it, and kill Mixed State and myself, ending my mother’s genetic line.”

Mane did not respond.

“On the other hoof, if we succeed, I will offer my body to you.”

The stallion twitched as if Sherbert had poked him in the ribs. Despite still being curled into a ball on the mattress, he brushed his tail to one side so he could look at her intently. “You’re serious?”

“Hormonal regulators interfere with my thought processes, so I have not used them recently.” Sherbert bit lightly on her bottom lip. “If it did not endanger our mission, I would have delayed this task a week or so. As it is, I am… Well…”

“Horney,” said Mane with a sniff. “Did you even consider that your monthly hormones might interfere with my concentration and scrap the mission?”

“You are a professional,” said Sherbert. “As am I. You are also an intelligent unicorn with good teeth and no apparent need to remain after fertilization. Such opportunities do not happen often. I would be a fool to pass it up, if I am to reproduce my genetic line. Still, I do not think it wise to engage in intercourse before you transport yourself to the target.”

“Or instead?” offered Mane hopefully. “No. Wait. This is nuts. You’re telling me that if I carry my end of this deal, teleport back and forth four times with a heavy load, you’ll have sex with me and hope for a foal?”

“Yes,” said Sherbert, relieved that Mane could see the appeal of logic in her plan.

“No,” said Mane. “I’m not going to sleep with you once to have a foal and run away.”

“There would not be any sleeping,” started Sherbert carefully, considering that his previous story might have had an element of truth buried inside. “And it may take more than once.”

For the longest time, Mane simply watched her, looking into her eyes instead of at any of the rest of her body. Then he shook his head in long, slow motions. “For a while, I thought you were crazy and I was sane. Now I’m thinking you’re the sane one, and I’m crazy.”

“Sanity is a myth.” Sherbert put the manual to one side. “I believe it is time for us to begin. The noises from above are sufficient, and I hear nothing from inside the submarine any more.”

* * *

Seen from up close, Mane’s special talent was far more impressive than he claimed. The bow of Tinkles faded from view as if it were turning to glass, showing the murky water of the Manehattan harbor, then a hoof-sized transparent window in the steel hull of the German submarine that revealed hints of the small room beyond, becoming slightly more clear as the Equestrian lighting flooded in.

“Nobody there. Here goes.” Mane took a Maltie out of his minimal sidesaddle and devoured it with one quick bite. Then there was a flicker of movement far quieter than normal teleportation, and the quiet stallion by her side was elsewhere. It was less dramatic than she expected, leaving little to indicate his presence in the small radio room other than a faint hornglow like foxfire chasing around the room. She turned Tinkles’ lights down similarly so there would not be any leakage in the event that a German opened the radio room door, but then again, that would be a disaster with or without lights.

Fear would be counterproductive, so she did not feel it. Anticipation, perhaps. The churning in her belly was nothing more than hormones causing ineffective responses to faulty stimuli. It had nothing to do with the way her watch had slowed to a crawl, or the way she could taste bile in the back of her throat.

She checked the box of raw materials for the hundredth time, as well as the paper and ink needed for the copy spell. None of it would be worth spit if Mane got captured. She had been exaggerating slightly for Mane’s behalf. Mix could swim, and if things ‘dropped in the pot’ as they said, he would be in the harbor like an otter. However, trapped in this infernal steel tube, she would undoubtedly die…

And Mane was back, carrying two bundles in his magic and dripping much like he had run all the way up Mount Canter in the rain. The tension across her chest eased a bit at his presence, although she had to admit to some worry at seeing his obvious fatigue and the way he was gasping for air in short breaths.

“It’s more difficult than I expected. Here.” The case holding the encryption machine nearly hit the deck when he released it, and Sherbert staggered under the load. Mane took another Maltie out of his sidesaddle, but it fell out of his magic and landed somewhere before rolling away Thankfully, he had more, and proceeded to eat several while watching her work..

“Perhaps the proximity of so much salt water and steel affects your magic,” she murmured while arranging the items on the floor, or deck as it was called on a naval vessel. The box of scrap metal and plastic she had brought was excessive, but she would rather have a kilo too much than a gram too little when using her particular spell.

She bent to her task as quickly and efficiently as possible. Other than the typewriter, she had never copied anything quite this large before, and the cloying air of the steel tube she was imprisoned inside dragged on her magic much the same way that Mane must have been hindered. It required intense focus to reproduce the wires and plugs, plating letters on the discs and fixing the important parts while ignoring the wooden box around the device. Sweat threatened to run down into her eyes by the time she was done and pushed the crude duplicate to one side.

The caseless copy was far from perfect, but it was functionally identical to the pragmatic German design with all the wires and plugs sufficiently matching the original in a way that ordinary photography would never have been able to duplicate. With the primary subject completed, Sherbert turned her attention to the manuals, only to find Agent Mane had a considerable stack of duplicated papers to his side.

“Faster we’re done, the faster we’re out of here,” he muttered from between clenched jaws that gave brief, quick crunches of malted milk balls, most probably for energy.

It was impeccable logic, except that no matter how quickly they accomplished the copy task, the return of Tinkles to the dock depended completely on Mixed State’s ongoing party on the barge above them. There was still a fragment of truth in his statement, and Sherbert was feeling a little dizzy when she stood up, so the assistance would be foolish to turn down. She bent to the task with her usual precision, letting the ink leap onto the duplicated pages with precise bursts of magic and finishing one of the last codebooks at the same time Mane put his back on the stack.

“That’s all of them,” he rasped. “All originals, number verified, return trip initiated, go.” The steel of the submarine’s front hull shimmered into transparency, then the German sub’s hull faded away too, and Mane was gone again with his original burden.

In hindsight, Mane looked terrible, much like he was pushing his magic too far. If she had thought things through, she could have copied codebooks until she ran completely out of magic, leaving Mane with more power to complete his end of the task. Despite the problems only a subset of the full codebook volumes would entail, decryption would still be possible although difficult, but having Mane run out of magic while trapped on the German submarine would be a disaster.

She was worried for him.

It caught her by surprise. Being concerned about herself was fairly rare. Justifiable concern over Mixed State was understandable. But Mane? He was a spy, used to taking risks for misplaced patriotism and an inadequate paycheck. He knew the hazards involved with his job. Undoubtedly, he had been in other situations which could have resulted in his death.

And having light from Tinkles pour into the German submarine’s radio room would not help, so she reached over and turned the lights back down as they had been before. It helped to see the faint glow of his magic flitting around the dark room, since he had left the hull transparent in a small section while he worked. It was probably a precaution for a quick getaway so he could see his destination for teleportation, therefore she stood by the light switch and waited for his signal.

Having the interior door of the German submarine open up without warning was not what she expected.

A practical blaze of light cascaded into the radio room and blinded Sherbert for a moment. The magical ‘window’ that Mane was keeping transparent was around ankle-level for the humans, but right at the end of her nose so all she could see was a set of black military shoes as what had to be the radio operator strode into the tiny room and stopped abruptly.

8. Duplicity

Equestria 1939 - Weird World War
Duplicity

“It was for Hitler to say when the war would begin, but it is not for him or his successor to say when it will end. It began when he wanted it, and it will end only when we are convinced that he has had enough.”
—Churchill’s speech to the nation, October 12, 1939

Sherbert flipped Tinkles’ lights the rest of the way off just before the radio operator in the German submarine reached down to the floor. For a moment, she thought he had spotted the Equestrian espionage operation by the light leakage, but then his fingers closed on a flattened object and he stood back up.

It was a blasted Maltie. Mane must have dropped one during his haste to get the encryption machine put back into the enclosure and the codebooks put on the desk in the same order they had been before. The only puzzling fact that Sherbert could not identify was how the German officer in a well-lit room could miss a unicorn.

Until she caught a glimpse of something hiding under the German’s desk, shimmering softly in the same way a transparent unicorn might conceal his presence.

Sherbert’s heart was pounding as if she had run up a dozen flights of stairs. There was nothing she could do from her position, and the helplessness overwhelmed her. It flooded her rational mind, weakened her knees, dried her mouth, and knotted her gut into spasms. The sensation was unlike anything she had experienced before, even when her mother had tried to acclimatize her to a pressure chamber.

The fear was for somepony other than herself, and far more powerful than any concern she could muster for her own well-being.

In a blinding flash, Sherbert realized just why her mother had sent her father away to a spouse of his own. She saw something in Father that threatened her ability to live without him, the same something that was encompassing her daughter right now. Somepony who was more important than her, somepony who she would die without.

Like Mane.

She could not excuse the emotional tidal wave sweeping over her as a ‘mere’ hormonal reaction. Every little thing she had done in his presence and his reactions to them played through her memories like a cinema reel, in full color and deafening volume. She had been blind, clueless to his reactions due to her own inexperience and bias. The motions of the German radio officer felt unimportant and distant, as if he were a thousand furlongs away. Finally, the human finished looking around the spotless submarine deck in search of another incriminating candy, turned for the door, and left.

In a brief shimmer of light, Mane rushed to the small transparent section of hull he was still holding his magic over and peered into the darkness of Tinkle’s hull. Sherbert maintained the presence of mind to flip on the dim lights so he could see his teleportation destination, but despite a look of intense concentration and several small sparks, Mane merely remained where he was.

“I’m sorry,” he barely managed to mouth to Sherbert, but she was having none of it.

Something deep inside her raised its head in rebellion over her genetic legacy. She was not her mother, following the same chain of inevitable decisions, locked into her destiny like some animal. Those chains of logic shattered under her emotional surge, letting her reach through their thready connection with her magic, through the waves of panic consuming Mane’s brilliant mind, though his uncertainty and doubt, and gave him what little magic she had left and more. For a fraction of a second, Sherbert thought it was not enough.

Then Mane was there.

He was so terrified that he could not talk, and at any moment she expected him to start screaming, so she did the only thing she could think of, and clamped her lips to his in what was supposed to be a kiss. Hopefully, she had not chipped a tooth from her inexperience, but it kept him from making a noise. Well, other than a surprised grunt.

After what seemed to be an eternity, she heard the muffled noises of the German radio operator returning to his tiny room on the other submarine, accompanied by another human.

“Captain, I am positive somebody has been in here. I thought it was one of the crew at first, but the room smells like a wet horse. Could we have a spy onboard?”

There was a clunking noise of shoes moving around before Captain Goßler responded, “I don’t smell anything, but I’m surprised we can smell at all after being deployed in a horse stable for this long.”

“Well…” The radio operator refused to go away, and added, “So perhaps a member of the crew brought over one of the dancing mares?”

“The Marinenachrichtendienst and Reichssicherheitshauptamt both cleared every member of this crew, and Heydrich personally signed off on the decisions. If there was a spy here…” The captain stopped for an exceedingly long time. “Check the encoding machine.”

Sherbert listened with her full attention, glad that the tiny transparent section of hull that let her look into the other submarine’s radio room had gone back to a dull painted steel with Mane’s return. She could hardly breathe, although it helped when she stopped locking lips with her… whatever Mane could be called.

His shaking had calmed to a low tremble, allowing Mane to lick his lips, wince slightly at a minor tooth-induced cut, and take a brief chocolate-tinged breath of his own.

“I hope you put everything back correctly,” whispered Sherbert.

“I’m very good at what I do.” Mane took several short breaths and added, “I hope.”

The distorted voice of the German radio officer confirmed that claim. “Nothing out of place, Kapitän. The safe appears unopened and all code pads are accounted for. Shall I write this up in the reports for Berlin?”

“Nein. The candy probably stuck to a shoe. Far too much of the horse-people’s items have worked their way back aboard.” The captain heaved a deep sigh as another musical number began on the barge above Sherbert’s head, making it so she could just barely make out his next words. “Lock it up after you have transmitted this message. We might as well put on an appearance at the Blueblood party in coordination with our horse-allies. None of the projects are close to fruition, after all. Dismissed.”

Sherbert continued holding onto Mane while listening to the radio operator make clunking and rattling noises in his tiny cubicle. It did not seem an appropriate time for any inadvertent noises from either of them, so she applied her lips to his again, and maintained that embrace until the noises died out and the radio room door thumped closed again.

“Why did you quit?” whispered Mane when Sherbert backed away a short distance.

“I didn’t think—” Any thinking she had been doing went away when Mane returned to kissing her, only with far greater skill. It was… educational, to say the least. It could not last forever, though. After a substantial amount of time, it was her turn to back away slightly and hold a hoof over his nose to keep him from following.

“Better?” asked Mane, and nuzzled the sensitive spot on the bottom of her hoof that made it itch.

“Yes.” It was the only word that filled her otherwise empty head.

Mane appeared to be unwilling to speak any more, even in quiet whispers, and showed no more interest in kissing while the trembling in his coat ebbed and flowed like the tide. He did not release her, thankfully. She had never been held like this before, and did not want it to stop. Her embrace in return was a clumsy, awkward thing, undoubtedly pinching him in uncomfortable places in ways that his normal feminine companionship—human or pony—would consider inept.

They were odd things, emotions that Sherbert had never permitted within her mind, and they seemed to be quite unwilling to return to their prison. It was only fair. She had no real reason to lock them up again, and one very important reason to leave them free reign. A reason that she appreciated in ways that she had never dared before.

It would be educational to see how this played out. Turning down an educational opportunity like this was not scientific, after all. And it promised to be rewarding in the future.

“I’m still afraid,” admitted Mane. He held her a little closer. “All I could think of was what the Germans would do to you when they found me. It frightened me to the core.”

“And now?” asked Sherbert, feeling a little more like herself and willing to go beyond one-word questions.

“Still afraid. Different things. I suppose…” He let his breath out slowly. “Abandonment issues suck.”

“Both of us,” admitted Sherbert. “My mother was so controlling. I swear I thought she planned on dying, just to test my reactions again. But then she was gone and I… had nothing.”

“Except a father and a brother.”

“True.” Sherbert rested her forehead against Mane’s unlit horn. It was painful to talk, but even more painful to hold the memories inside with him so close. “I pushed them away. Or at least I tried. They don’t push well, as you might guess. I didn’t want them around. If they died too—”

“You needed them so much you drove them away. Story of my early life, too. Everytime I got comfortable, from the Dutch doctor’s house to being a spy, I found some reason to run away from comfort and into danger. Caught between trying to get myself killed and surviving.” Mane leaned back against her head until his horn touched hers. “I don’t want to fall for you, Sherbert J. Lemon. I’m afraid I’ll run away again, and leave you alone.”

“Mane,” cautioned Sherbert. “Shut up.”

There was more kissing, gentler and with less dental damage. Sherbert had always been a quick study, and this was a very enticing lesson from a good teacher. Unfortunately, words began to build up in her head, and she had to stop— that is briefly pause for a few moments before they spilled out on their own.

“I’m not sure what I did to assist you in the other submarine,” said Sherbert almost silently. “Whatever it is, it could have killed us both.”

Mane took in the news with only a slight widening on his eyes, barely visible in the minimal glow of Tinkle’s instrument lights. “Interesting.”

“It bears additional research, yes.” Sherbert looked deep into Mane’s teal eyes. “I thought I just wanted a foal. Now, I’m fairly certain I want several of them, and it would be foolish to cast aside such a good genetic specimen in search of something better.”

“Oh,” said Mane, who had stopped moving or blinking.

“You said you didn’t want to just impregnate me and leave earlier, correct?”

Still quite obviously thinking, Mane nodded once.

“I will give you the option of remaining afterward, with one caution,” added Sherbert. “Before you decide, I must warn you that I am a very headstrong mare. I have particular ways of doing things. I have opinions on social activities which I consider impractical or counter-productive. On the other hoof, I am able to restrain my urges when the stakes are sufficiently large. For example, you know something about Root Stock, something that most likely is a Crown secret, and therefore something related to the German location where she conducted her most recent research project. Your speech patterns and mannerisms made that obvious. Someday, you will tell me. That is not a prediction. That is a fact. It will wait. You need not ask about it, or indicate in any way that I have made this assumption. You would not withhold such information without good cause.”

“I can’t say anything about that.” Mane huddled closer without attempting to resume kissing. “I’m not going to say anything about it. Maybe not ever.”

It did not seem to be the time for another kiss. She did not know what to do, so she did nothing, which seemed to be the correct decision as she felt him begin to relax against her in small steps. It was so fascinating that it took her a very long time to recognize something quite obvious.

“I’m not afraid.”

“I am,” said Mane almost immediately. He remained still for a while, breathing against her coat in slower breaths before adding, “I think I’m more afraid than when I was trapped in the other submarine.”

“But are you afraid of being in the submarine,” said Sherbert quietly.

There was a long silence, broken only by thoughtful breathing. It answered Sherbert’s question quite well.

“All creatures are afraid of the unknown,” she continued. “Hide in the dark and it will remain unknown forever, but bring it out, expose it to the light of day…”

“With help?” asked Mane.

“Of course. I don’t know enough about relationships to be afraid of them,” admitted Sherbert. “But I’m willing to learn. They seem to have certain advantages. Other than sex.”

Mane nodded much slower, then took a deeper breath. “This is not what I expected from a first date.”

“Me neither.” Sherbert thought for a time, an activity that she found quite difficult in such close proximity to his masculine scent, which incidentally had almost gotten them both captured and killed. “Wait. Was that an attempt at humor?”

“A lighthearted quip designed to lower stress levels in a tense situation and divert attention away from something I should not or do not want to talk about,” said Mane almost immediately, with the tiny hint of a familiar smile beginning to emerge from the corner of his lips. “It was part of our training.”

“The mind boggles. Did Princess Mi Amore Cadenza conduct… Of course she did.”

“I was a very good student. Top of the class,” said Mane.

A tiny bubble of levity rose in Sherbert’s chest, and she touched her nose to his. “Does that mean I should investigate the rest of your classmates first before making a decision?”

Mane kissed her gently on the nearby nose as she had wanted. “No. I think I shall keep you a secret from them. Disreputable lot, all of them. Spies, you know.”

“You have high recommendations. Mother approved of you,” said Sherbert. “So did the Princess of Love.”

“I just got a kiss for her approval. On the cheek, of course.”

“Because Shining Armor was in the room,” continued Sherbert, “and you wished to keep all of your teeth. Correct?”

Mane licked his lips. “You are your mother’s daughter.”

“I am myself,” said Sherbert. “For good or ill, I bear my mother’s genes as well as my father’s.”

It seemed like a good spot for more holding and kissing, since the party on the barge’s deck was going to go on for a long time, and she was not quite ready to initiate intimacy. It would break this precious moment they were sharing, and they had time.

Years, hopefully.

“My father, my real father was a cook,” said Mane abruptly in the middle of several kisses. “He fled before I was born. My mother left me. And now… I’m afraid you’ll leave me too.”

“Why?” Sherbert leaned forward and practiced her lesson again. There was still the awkward question of where to put her horn when they moved, but it did not seem as much of a problem as it was an educational experience. It did seem to be an odd confession, though. When she had a brief break, some time later, she indulged in her curiosity.

“Your father was a cook?” she asked.

“Well… Yes.”

They still had time. There were secrets best talked out of him in the future. Still, the admission bothered her enough to ask, “Why is that important?”

Mane reluctantly reached behind a nearby console and hesitantly brought out a package. “You know. A loaf of bread. A jug of wine. And thou. I don’t like cooking. It reminds me of… him. Still, the way to a mare’s heart is through her stomach, and since we can’t leave until the party’s over, we might as well have something to eat,” he finished in one long burst of words.

“Magical exhaustion is a serious matter. A snack would be medically well-advised.” She nosed open the package instead of using her magic, which was just barely starting to feel tingly again. “Tarts for a tart?”

“Fruit tarts,and some other pastries I baked yesterday,” corrected Mane. “And non-alcoholic cider, because I did not want to get you drunk.”

Lacking magic for the moment, Sherbert emerged from the package with a cookie in her teeth, which she tried to share with Mane and broke into a giggling fit when the cookie broke also, sending crumbs in all directions. They each tended to their own snacking after that, although Sherbert found herself at a dead end when she tried to get the lid off the coffee thermos.

“Mix always makes this look easy,” she grumbled, getting a better grip on the cylindrical steel and the screw-off top with a bent fetlock.

“There’s a trick to it. Here,” said Mane. He put the bottom of the thermos against the deck, then dropped his mouth onto the ‘cork’ and gave a sharp twist. In a few moments, Sherbert was holding a cup of steaming coffee between her forehooves and taking a few small sips.

“Mother was a firm believer in others facing their fears.” Sherbert took a long drink, then passed the cup over to Mane. “I don’t think she planned our situation. Even at her best, she never could have been this convoluted.”

“Celestia, maybe.” Mane finished off the coffee and sat the empty cup to one side. “I tried to outsmart her once. It was educational. Her plans go back years. Decades, even. I better stop there.”

“Cadence was worried about her,” said Sherbert, although she cut off abruptly at the sound of the German radio room door opening. It seemed easier to remain silent and engage in an alternate activity while the officer worked at the tools of his trade, although the German was certainly not having as enjoyable an evening as Sherbert. When the submarine door operated again and nothing but silence could be heard from their incidental hull-to-hull contact, she broke off their kiss and added quietly, “She said something dark was coming. Something worse than war.”

“It would be futile to worry overly much about whatever it is.” Mane picked up the empty coffee cup from where it had rolled when they were kissing. “We do what we are asked, and leave the rest to the powers atop Mount Olympus. It’s the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keeps the darkness at bay, and we are very small folk indeed.”

Mane paused for a moment. “It’s from The Hobbit.”

“Ah,” said Sherbert. “Fiction.”

“Most historical texts contain only bits and pieces of the truth,” countered Mane. “True history seldom rhymes. Well, human history. I shall have to introduce you to my oldest friends. Liars one and all, but tiny shards of the truth can be found if one looks carefully between the pages. It’s very much like spying.”

They continued to eat in relative silence, with the wild sounds of partying going on above and the occasional mysterious thumping noises from the German submarine. Sherbert was far more used to smaller meals, mostly brought to her in paper bags or served by a cafeteria worker in a manenet. This was… nice. Well, it would be nicer in a different environment. It was still nice in a way that she never wanted to change.

“I’m still afraid in a different way,” she volunteered once the last crumb had been dealt with. “No matter how much I want to go screaming out of this repurposed sewer pipe… I have you. That made the urge tolerable. I was afraid you’d want to stay with me earlier. Now I’m afraid you’ll leave. You know. Since you seduce mares for a living.”

“You think this is easy for me?” Mane carefully wiped his lips with a paper towel, which he stuffed back into the package with the rest of their discarded snack materials. “I was just going to buy you flowers, but that’s what I always did. Then I almost went into a bakery, and had a panic fit at the thought that my father might have been working inside. You are an unexplored wilderness to me, filled with bears and tigers. I finally met a mare who can see through me like a window, and I don’t know how to deal with it.”

“You can start by contacting your parents,” said Sherbert bluntly. “We work for the Equestrian intelligence service, after all, and most foreign Equestrians have been recalled, so they should be somewhere nearby. Or if you do not want to meet with them, I can act in your stead.”

“Hello, I’m pregnant by your son and wanted to know your favorite choice for foals names?” A series of conflicted emotions flowed across the stallion’s face, ending with, “I’ll go with you, provided you lead with that.”

“Agreed.” Sherbert put the last of her leftover paper wrappings back into the empty food parcel, then looked back up at him. “Now, I believe there is some sort of seduction you are supposed to engage in before that can occur, correct?”

It was a very educational night for both of them.

9. Dezinformatsiya Denouement

Equestria 1939 - Weird World War
Dezinformatsiya Denouement

“We desire the utmost friendship with the people of Canada. If their country is ever attacked, our Navy will be defending their seas, our soldiers will fight on their battlefields, our fliers will die in their skies. But have they the right to draw this hemisphere into a European war simply because they prefer the Crown of England to American independence?”
— Colonel Charles Lindbergh, October 13 radio broadcast

The phrase ‘party until the sun comes up’ was Manehattan’s downtown motto. The waterfront was no exception. Distant music and street noises percolated down to the docks, including one rusty steel drydock door with a shabby cab parked nearby. The driver was shabbier than most of the bums at the dock, wearing a tattered cloth bucket hat and a brown blanket to protect his back from the harness. Anypony randomly observing the driver would think he was simply a lazy cabbie taking a smoke break, or perhaps a criminal looking for an easy place to steal merchandise. But an acute observer would note that the laconic expression on the long-haired stallion did not match his piercing eyes, which watched every shadow and movement, be it passers by or stray cats in search of rodents.

Eventually, and very slowly, the rusty steel door of the drydock creaked open just far enough for a pony to pass through, and then a second. Much like the cab, they fit well into the waterfront where the occasional mare and stallion found dark shadows to canoodle in rather than the expense and public display of renting a room by the hour. They leaned against each other, carrying several packages wrapped in crumpled brown paper as if they could not find a trash receptacle in which to place their booze bottles and food wrappers after their midnight rendezvous.

Manehattan was far more tidy than its human analogue. Loose trash in the streets was unheard of, and bottles carried a sizable deposit.

The young couple continued leaning against each other during their short walk, their coats pressed firmly and occasional whispers exchanged, or at least until they neared the cab. The young stallion nodded once, his eyes darted around without moving his head, and he said simply, “Prime.”

“Mane,” responded the shaggy stallion in a low voice that could not be heard more than a pace or two away. His piercing grey eyes changed targets. “Sherbert. Success?”

“Yes, I believe so,” said Sherbert in a near-whisper She looked around, far less gracefully than her companions, and added, “Is it safe for you to be here, sir?”

“There are four units of the Night Guard within eyesight,” said Prime. “One of them has a 75mm pack howitzer zeroed in on the German submarine. Concealed behind a screen, of course. When I found out you planned on taking Unit 14 for a joyride—”

“Tinkles,” said Mane. “The guys in the development group won’t call her anything else. And how did you find out? I thought we were being discreet?”

Prime raised one bushy eyebrow. “I do run a branch of the Equestrian intelligence service after all. Allow me to keep some secrets. Besides, you were going to let Mixed State get within grabbing distance of the Germans. Do you know how many secrets he has in his head?”

Sherbert could not respond. She just looked down at the dirty wood of the docks while Prime continued, “Thankfully, we have untraceable assets available. Your brother remained under guard here until your mission returned and your presence verified. His report was rather… short.”

“Hey, Sis.” Mixed State picked his way over to the structure that concealed Tinkles’ conning tower, moving the decorative banners to one side and putting a few leftover bottles into their cases for return to the store. He unlocked the structure’s padlock first, then lifted the wooden box away so he could knock on the hatch. “Sis,” he repeated in a cheerful voice. “Did you get what you wanted?”

He spun the unlocking wheel of the hatch and lifted, only to dart backwards when Sherbert’s yellow magic grabbed the hatch and slammed it back shut, nearly taking off his nose.

“Give us another hour,” filtered Sherbert’s voice from inside. “Maybe two.”

“We are ready to go onto the second phase of our project,” said Sherbert. “I believe we can have the ceremony at the office, with five or six of the other scientists in attendance, although the honeymoon will wait, probably until after the foal is born and weaned.”

Mane very carefully applied his hoof to his forehead and took a deep breath. “The other project, Bert.”

“Oh. Yes.” Sherbert shifted uncomfortably under the packages resting on her back. “That is also ready to go into the second phase. Results will be more unpredictable, though. Mane should be made part of the project at the earliest opportunity. His literary skills should prove valuable in common phrase analysis for a better understanding of the… project’s complexity. However, there is something that needs to be done first.”

She reached into the package with her magic and removed a small slip of paper, which she passed over to Prime. “We shall need to use the resources of the agency to locate Mane’s parents, so that he may reintroduce himself and inform them of their status as prospective grandparents.”

Prime took the paper, looked at it once, and placed it in his saddlebag. Then he reached into his vest and passed Sherbert a similar piece of paper with two names and addresses on it.

Mane looked at the paper and his eyes grew wide. “My parents? You knew about them? My father lives right here in Manehattan. How…”

Prime shrugged. “Remember that I do run an intelligence agency. Besides, I have a certain responsibility to keep track of my brother.”

“Brother?” Mane blinked once. Sherbert merely considered the similarities she had noted between Mane and his uncle, which made far more sense in retrospect.

“Admittedly, my nephew has been considerably more difficult to keep out of trouble,” continued Prime in the resulting silence. “He travels all over the world on the most frivolous of tasks, mostly false, but I have faith that he may eventually settle down and raise a family with a reasonable mare. Somepony who can tolerate him, which I will admit has been a constant concern to me and my wife. No, I did not marry your mother,” he added quickly. “Nanna is a researcher in the Canterlot deep archives. Unwed, as I understand, but she has a daughter born several months after she made it back to Equestria.”

Mane attempted to speak several times, making little starts and stops while Prime stood impassively without further comment. After some time to think and a few deep breaths, she was getting impatient so Sherbert decided to urge the informational release on with a few questions.

“So she was pregnant when she fled?”

Prime nodded.

“Does the father know?” she continued.

“Unfortunately, he did not make it out of Germany.” Prime shifted in discomfort. “Banana Pudding was fairly traumatized by her experience. She raised Peach Pit on her own in Canterlot. Brilliant little filly. Top marks in Celestia’s school. I suspect she knows about Mane and your father but does not want to disturb her mother over things in her past. I’m the head of an intelligence agency, and there are times I don’t know who knows what about who in my own family.”

“So she left me—” started Mane, only to be brought up short by Sherbert.

“Panicked ponies do not think,” she stated calmly. “They run.”

Prime nodded again. “Shame can blind one just as well. Mane, she knows of your presence, but as of our most recent communication, she was still adamant about concealing her relationship to you with the mistaken assumption that she was protecting you. For an intelligent mare, she can be remarkably foolish.”

“I understand completely,” said Sherbert.

“I… think it’s going to take a little more time for me,” said Mane slowly. His eyes narrowed, and he fixed Prime with an intent, serious look. “You knew. You knew about both of them.”

“Yes,” said Prime, although he did not go on, or change topics. He merely remained looking back at his nephew with a stoic expression much like one might look at a wrapped package making a ticking noise.

“You didn’t think I should know too?” asked Mane. “I mean—”

“Neither of them wanted you to know.” Prime took a deep breath. “Do you think we could discuss this later in my office?”

“An attempt to change the environment of this conversation to his advantage,” said Sherbert. “Deny it and continue.”

Mane favored her with a brief glance and looked as if he were going to shout at Prime, but did not say a word for a long time.

“Knowing would not change the past,” said Prime in an uncharacteristic long burst of words. “My brother ran. Took the coward’s way out. Yes, I know. He mentions it every time we dine together. He’s a sous chef at the Flagrant Flamingo now. Has a wife. Four foals, and one on the way. He knows I helped get your mother out. Trying to find you… Well, you have a talent for not being found, after all. We tracked your progress. Made sure Her Highness inducted you into the service. After that, he only really had one of two questions for me every time we met. Is he out? Is he back? And he always asked, is he safe? I think he is comforted by you being an intelligence agent. He doesn’t have to make any motion toward reuniting. Apologizing. Finding out if you ever want him in his life anymore. I think it is high time this changes. It has been long enough. Next Thursday eve when we dine again, I would be greatly pleased to bring along two guests.”

“We accept,” said Sherbert.

“Wait a minute,” said Mane.

“Unless you want me going by myself and telling your father everything. And I mean everything,” continued Sherbert. “Everything.”

“I’ll go, I’ll go.” Mane winced. “I’ve faced terrors beyond description, and that includes being locked in a steel tube with some psychopaths. This is a lot to take in at once.”

“You gained an uncle, two parents, several half-siblings and a spouse in one night,” said Sherbert. “I have in-laws to consider now also. Our lives have gained considerable complexity. Tell me you are not considering flight.”

“Uh… Briefly,” admitted Mane.

“You are not your father,” said Prime. “And the rest of this will wait until we reach my office tomorrow.”

“Next week,” said Sherbert.

“Tomorrow,” insisted Prime. “A semblance of regular order is essential to maintain the illusion of normality. Get into the cab and I will take you to one of your apartments. Leave the package behind in the cab when we arrive. I will see it to the institute and your laboratory, where you may delve into its mysteries behind closed doors.”

“Acceptable,” said Sherbert. “But this will affect your tip.”

Two days later, in Prime’s office, Sherbert was feeling just a little like a child who had just been denied a cookie. With Herman on one side and Mane on the other, she was sandwiched from retreat, but not sheltered from Prime’s discouraging glare.

“Before you start with apologies or excuses, we have been monitoring the Germans’ behavior over the last two days, and do not think your little stunt has been detected. Officially, this never happened. Unofficially, if my current nephew and future niece in law decide on such a rash course of action in the future, a note would be appropriate at the bare minimum.”

“Understood,” said Sherbert.

“No, I do not think you understand,” continued Prime without missing a beat. “It is not only that I value my nieces and nephews, and various humans I have developed friendships with during my term in this office—” Prime nodded at Herman without a pause “—but had this scheme gone sideways, I would be the one explaining things to Her Highness. How my nephew and his friends complicated Princess Mi Amore Cadenza’s diplomatic trip to Europe, putting her and the whole country in danger, and while every effort we can spare is being used to evacuate our citizens quietly from the ongoing war.”

“It’s all my fault—”

As much as Agent Mane was trying to cover for Herman, that was Sherbert’s responsibility, and she forced her excuse over the top of her… whatever Mane was becoming.

“No. This is all mine. Herman tried to stay out of this. I dragged him in. Mane did not want to go into the submarine, but I convinced him using my feminine wiles.”

“Wiles.” Prime fixed her with his most impassive stare.

“I have wiles,” protested Sherbert, suddenly feeling as if the ground were shifting under her hooves. “And they’re feminine.”

“It’s true, Uncle Prime,” said Mane with a look of absolute sincerity. “She captured my heart and led me into this lunatic scheme like a puppy on a leash. I was helpless in the face of her unleashed desire, absolutely helpless. She’s a dangerous mare. Perhaps you should recruit her for fieldwork.”

Herman stifled a brief chuckle. Prime was not amused.

“If you call me Uncle Prime one more time, I will take you back to Unit 14 and weld you inside. And you.” The shaggy stallion shifted his gaze back to Sherbert. “Once you have made another copy of the device and notes for somepony to deliver to Her Highness, I will assign a linguistics expert to your project. It will not help. The only official reports coming out of your laboratory will be how difficult the task is and how you are not making any progress.”

Mane shifted in place and cleared his throat. “I presume a spy might be in the laboratory, and might keep Her Highness up to date on actual events. Oh, and I shall need a few days off every month to visit my sainted elderly mother in Canterlot. We have not seen each other in ages, and I have some catching up to do.”

“Granted.” Prime nodded. “Take the sketches your marefriend made of the U-49 internal layout since you will have no further use for them, in any regard. And you.”

Prime shifted his attention to Mister Guttman, who did not look as if he were looking forward to the dressing-down. Quite unexpectedly, Prime’s stern visage turned softer, and he lowered his voice to a polite register. “Herman, I trusted you to keep Sherbert out of trouble. Instead, you let her run wild with my nephew.”

“I know.” The big human sighed and spread his thick fingers out in front of him. “Kids. Miss Voltage would not have appreciated me getting out of the way when her daughter headed into trouble.”

“Madame Vernier encouraged this,” snapped Prime. “The only consolation I have is that when their children join the service, I will be retired and gone. To the Shetland islands, perhaps. Or the Falklands.”

“And I should be buried next to my wife in Poland. Provided the Germans do not control both places by then. With that—” Herr Guttmann got up and stretched. “We should get back to work. I’m presuming the linguistic specialist you are sending is a young stallion, perhaps handsome enough that I should keep a close eye on his interactions with Sherbert.”

“Yes,” said Prime curtly, obviously not seeing the humor in the situation. “You are dismissed. And you two will be prepared to go to dinner on Thursday. No excuses.”

“No excuses,” echoed Mane.

10. Declarations of War and Love

Equestria 1939 - Weird World War
Declarations of War and Love

“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”
— Winston Churchill, Speech to Parliament, June 21, 1940

It had been said since time immemorial that there were only three things a wise pony should fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle mare. Tonight, the night was calm, quiet as the grave, and the Manehattan harbor reflected the full moon like a mirror.

Sherbert Lemon was not gentle.

She was angry, but not furious that Princess Celestia had decided that she and one other should be present at this boring site for no apparent rational reason. Still, alicorns ordered and mortals obeyed. Even when those orders came from a rather frazzled Royal Guard, who dropped off Sherbert’s mother-in-law at the lab with an extremely short note defining just when and where the two of them should wait this evening for… something.

Banana Pudding was not happy, not cleared for Sherbert’s lab, and not willing to be a chatty conversationalist to her inadvertent daughter-in-law, despite this being the first time they had actually met in the flesh, so to say. This left a rather cranky ‘Mamma Nanna’ to be hustled off to Apartment Lemon for a few hours until their mysterious Royal appointment was due. Sherbert could not even pass the task off to her errant husband, because he was off on another secret-secret mission with his father and what seemed to be most of the adult males inside Q-branch.

Cowards, both of them.

There had been little feminine bonding in Sherbert’s evening with her mother-in-law. The tension was nearly palatable during their shared takeout dinner, some consultation about the foal’s room redecorating, and a great deal not said about Mane’s absence or their relationship to the current point. It was unfair, really. Sherbert had invited Mane’s mother to the wedding with a very well-written letter, two pages, detailing the time and reason for the event, or at least the unclassified portion, once Security had finished redacting the final draft. And she had been very careful to write bi-weekly ever since, even if the letters were censored to bare social bones.

After a mostly silent evening in the apartment, Nanna had been a little skittish about walking through the supposedly crime-filled night to the Manehattan harbor, but there were supposedly answers waiting for them there, and neither mare said much until they reached their standing spot a good distance from the water…

And nothing happened for a while.

“Notice anything unusual?” asked Banana Pudding again, her yellow mane looking nearly white in the moonlight as she kept up a constant scan of the surroundings for muggers or thieves.

“No, Mamma Nanna.” Sherbert took a deep breath and considered the tiny foal shifting positions under her ribs. “Heartbeat and movements within normal parameters. Discomfort which is normal for this point in my pregnancy. You did not have to travel here from Canterlot. There are still several months before the birth. Please, be patient. Mane will be back from his assignment soon. With his father,” she could not help but add.

“The coward.” Nanna took a deep breath as well, still scanning the harbor. “And I didn’t have the option. Celestia ordered me here. Flat-out, no warning, right after her student went to Ponyville to arrange for the Summer Sun ceremony.”

It was a bit of a surprise to Sherbert. She did not like surprises, but the mere fact that Banana Pudding was actually talking to her for a change was a good sign that needed to be encouraged like Mane had taught her.

“Did she specify a reason?” asked Sherbert, her curiosity piqued by the fact that two unusual events in the same time frame had a fair chance of being related, and she was wondering why Mane and his father had to take off on a secret mission also. Gathering a few data points was a natural urge, and getting her reluctant mother-in-law to engage in conversation was a bonus.

“Does she ever?” Nana shifted positions with the clunk of steel shoes on the wooden walkway above the docks. “The only thing she told me very specifically was to make sure Twilight Sparkle got this particular book this morning. Oh, and make it look accidental. I’m not a spy, after all,” she practically spat.

“Like your son.” Sherbert took a deep breath of humid salty air. “He still resents what you did. The longer I carry his foal, the more I understand the reasoning for your flight from Germany. The fear for another life, so defenseless.”

“I know. I should never have left him behind.” Banana Pudding paced slowly on the dock, much like her son did when he was tense. She also had the same nervous habit of speaking in a long chain of unbroken words, but with the added trait of holding a pack of American cigarettes with one sticking out, vacillating constantly between lighting it and putting the pack away. “My friends from the university were supposed to get him out. Some friends. By the time I got to Italy, it was too late to go back. Then when I reached Equestria, Prime met me at the dock. Said he had gotten away to the Netherlands. Tried his best to watch over him. I was too upset to care. I just kept running, right until Celestia caught me.”

As confessions went, it was quite sincere. As information sources, it was promising enough to keep inquiring, but with a subtlety that came from living with Mane for several months.

“I know of nothing that Celestia does without reason,” she stated, wincing slightly at the grammar. “Her plans have plans with grey hair. To be given such a command directly relating to her newest promising student... I suspect she originally recruited you in Canterlot for this important task, even as trivial as it appears, and years afterward. What was the book?”

“Predictions and Prophecy.” A touch of concern swept most of the other emotions from Nana’s face, and Sherbert could see the same mental maneuvering that Mane exhibited when he was leaping from a hypothetical theory to a forgone conclusion without any of the intermediate steps that lesser minds worked through over the course of hours or days. “It has been around a thousand years,” she mused. “Nightmare Moon?”

“The return of a myth would be accompanied by a complete blackout of the sky,” said Sherbert, although she slowed as she thought also. “There were unusual thick clouds earlier, and they were swept away abruptly.”

“The Nightmare is a literary myth with no reflections in reality,” stated Banana Pudding, although she returned to observing the quiet Manehattan harbor. “It is a story for foals. What are they doing at the German submarine?”

“Unsure.” Sherbert considered the scene for a while since it was the only activity going on at the moment, and counted sailors being loaded back into the infernal contraption. “Knowing Mane, his absence and this activity are linked. As is the extraordinary quiet which seems to cover the harbor. Many of the ships are anchored without running lights, and I see nohuman on their decks.”

“The lab building looked abandoned when we left,” said Nanna. “Prime wasn’t in his office, and I think he sleeps in there. No guards, no researchers younger than fossilization age. Where did they all go?”

The faintest of breezes touched Sherbert’s neck, and the immense bulk of Princess Celestia landed light as a feather to one side of them. It was an expected-unexpected event since vast unseen forces seemed to be on the move in places that Sherbert could not directly observe, and only one alicorn had that kind of unmatched power. Still, being directly in her presence was a humbling feeling which she had not felt since the funeral for her mother and the complex emotions she was going through at the time.

It did not help Sherbert’s state of mind that there were two alicorns settling down upon the creaking dock timbers, and the other was most certainly not the bright and fluffy Princess Mi Amore Cadenza.

Celestia nodded at each of them, as did the dark alicorn just a moment afterward as if she were unaccustomed to the motion. Since the sky had cleared a few hours ago, revealing the changed thaumic constant of the moon and a shifted pattern of lunar maria, combined with the quarter-moon symbol on the newcomer’s cloth petryal… It gave Sherbert a very short and quite unexpected chain of logical suppositions to follow, ending in an impossible conclusion that stripped her of the ability to speak.

“Beg pardon, Sherbert. Banana. Your husbands are… otherwise engaged. I will not say they are perfectly safe, because that would be a lie.” Celestia swept one wing to the side and motioned to the dark alicorn. “I would introduce my sister, Princess Luna, whom has recently been—”

The ancient alicorn stopped, looking for a word, and Banana Pudding spoke where Sherbert dared not. “Freed from imprisonment on the moon? Was Nightmare Moon involved? I remember your student was far too enthused about the book of foal’s tales she borrowed from the Archives this morning. That was right before everything started going crazy. Well, crazier than Twilight’s activity normally is.”

Sherbert still had no words so she settled down on one knee and bowed, only to have Celestia lift her back up with the tip of one wing.

“An accurate evaluation, as far as it goes.” Celestia shook her head, looking somehow both impossibly tired and renewed with a sense of vigor that shone through Sherbert’s heart at the same time. Her glowing mane was putting out very little light, and she cast a sharp look at the German submarine in the harbor like it was responsible for her fatigue.

“Perhaps, an executive summary,” managed Sherbert, since her curiosity bump was itching more than ever. Little bits of recent events fell around her mind like snowflakes, and her gaze could not decide which of the princesses she wanted to watch while thinking. Celestia had no such issue, and thankfully fixed her personal archivist with her full attention instead of Sherbert.

“Nanna, you of all ponies deserve to hear the whole reasoning for my actions, because I used you as the trigger for my desperate gamble, much like Sherbert’s role…for reasons which are best kept from you. Suffice it to say, the Germans tempted me with the opportunity to free my sister through their technological advances in space travel, and instead prepared to use that weakness to drag my precious little ponies into their bloody conflict. Were it not for your brilliant son and daughter-in-law providing insight into their actions… things could have become far worse. And the situation is terrible enough as is. Hundreds of my little ponies are held hostage across Europe, trapped into a situation that I should never have allowed.”

“But… how can we retrieve them?” asked Banana Pudding. “Fleeing was a nightmare—” she twitched, giving a short glance at the newest dark princess “—many years ago.”

“Thine enemies hath created a situation where they shall be hoist by their own petard,” said the dark princess. “They gathered our citizens into ten enclaves, all the better to be guarded and used as hostages. This shall be their downfall. My sister hath sent a force of dragons and Equestrians — together with a great number of humans from this city — to free them and bring them home, after laying waste to their terrible weapons of slaughter.”

Celestia nodded quietly. “It is a dangerous gambit, and I only accepted those who volunteered knowing the risks. And yes, that included your former husband—” she nodded at Nanna “—and Herr Guttman.”

Sherbert was floored beyond anything before. The sheer audacity of the project was beyond her conception. Ten groups of dragons, a notoriously aloof and antisocial race, would have been sheer insanity to bring together. And entrusting humans into the attack… Well, humans were rather fractious and disorganized bunch, but they had a terrifying ability to operate as a unified force when threatened. It still left one question unasked, and Sherbert was unsure how to approach it other than directly.

“These terrible weapons of slaughter. They were not creations of my mother, were they?”

“No.” Celestia’s immense head lowered until she was looking at the dirty wood of the docks, but she said nothing more.

“Root Stock,” said Sherbert as the cold sense of familiarity began to soak in. “She was working for the Germans when we lost contact. She’s dead, isn’t she?”

Celestia nodded ever so slowly.

“They killed her, didn’t they?” Sherbert looked out across the quiet harbor where the last of the German submarine crew and various other humans were being loaded. In all odds, they were the spies and saboteurs that Mane had mentioned before, neatly packaged up for shipment back to Germany where they belonged. “I didn’t want to admit it, but her work in organophosphate insect poisons was revolutionary. What kills one can kill another, and they…”

“Killed her with her own experiment,” finished Celestia. “As they would have killed thousands of my own if I had opposed them openly.”

Sherbert swallowed as the red haze began to rise in her vision. Root Stock had been as close to a friend as she had in the lab. Then she had cheerfully headed out to her German assignment, lured by promising words in the letters that important German scientists had sent. Now all Sherbert could think of was seeing those liars all burn, torn apart, and fed to the sharks, but Banana Pudding moved up beside her and whispered, “Bert. Calm down. Think of the foal.”

“I am,” she muttered from between clenched teeth. “As long as one of those… creatures survives, my family is endangered. They deserve to burn, burn until nothing is left but ashes, and the ashes burned again.”

Sherbert twitched with the feeling of a wing brushing against her back, and to her shock, it was from the dark princess who had moved close on her other side. “Do not contaminate thy soul with thoughts of vengeance, young one. We shall bear that burden in your place. Anger distorts your inner self, turning light into a darkness which cannot be purged easily. Know that the ones who hath slain thy friend will not escape justice, pure justice, untainted by revenge or malice.” Dark lips curled up, exposing bright white teeth. “And they shall die. I have already discussed this with my sister, and you have nothing to fear. Their fate is inevitable.”

“Thank you, Princess… Luna,” managed Sherbert through unaccustomed tears.

She stood there for a time, sheltered by the warm wing and her husband’s mother while observing the crew of the U-49. Mamma Nanna was first to move away, toward Celestia while glancing back and forth up the empty docks before removing a small package from her bags and extracting a cigarette. She lit the end with a regulated burst of magic, then quietly floated it over to Princess Celestia, who practically inhaled it in a single breath. One large cloud of tobacco smoke later, the Sun Princess deposited the expended cigarette butt into a nearby stone receptacle and smiled ever so slightly, waving one wing so the smoke drifted away from Sherbert.

“At one time, you were adamant about Equestria remaining neutral,” said Celestia quietly once the smoke had cleared. “Now, we are at war, or at least we will be when our declaration is given to the German government.”

“You’re going to give it to Captain Goßler of the U-49?” asked Sherbert, once she had blown her nose on a kerchief floated over from her mother-in-law. “Why not simply send it by wireless? It could take several weeks for the submarine to make it back to German waters, if it is not sunk in the process. With the fall of France, all of the humans are shooting at all the other humans.”

“A full discussion will wait until later. For now, our next actions must wait until the young lad with the boat returns.”

Sherbert had not really given the young human on the harborboat much attention, even though he appeared to be the same child who had transported her on their first visit to the U-49. It took more than a few impatient minutes until he moored the craft at its proper location, then looked up at their mismatched group and waved.

“It is time.” Celestia turned to her sister. “You read the declaration. Do you want to write or hold?”

“I should hold,” said the dark alicorn with reluctance. “Changes in the German language over the centuries could result in misunderstandings.”

“Oh, I think the German chancellor will understand our message quite well. And I see the young human lad is getting his camera out. Shall we begin?”

“One moment, Celly.” Luna lit her horn with a dark and cold light. “Several of the humans are still outside of their clever vessel. Allow me.”

A searing beam of darkness lashed through the night, slicing through the submarine’s radio antenna like butter and leaving the coil of steel wire lashing in the Manehattan harbor. Several more bolts of alicorn magic severed other interesting bits of the submarine, and the last of the crew vanished inside just before the hatch was melted into immobility behind them.

“That should do it, Luna.” Celestia looked at where the young human was taking photographs, then nodded as if she was measuring a safe zone. “Try to hold it steady. The vessel is heavier than it looks.”

Once engulfed by the dark aura of alicorn magic, the U-49 lifted up out of the water a few feet at a time until it was just barely touching the surface. Water streamed from the scuppers and bilge, and several harbor waterfowl scurried for cover as if they knew what was coming next.

Then Celestia lit her horn, and the entire harbor was illuminated as if it were noon.

One word at a time, the Equestrian declaration of war appeared in bubbled steel and blistered paint, easily read by the red glowing letters left behind. It was straightforward, direct, and pulled no punches, although Sherbert would never have thought about carving it into the steel sides of a submarine.

“Sister,” cautioned Luna.

“Almost there,” said Celestia, although fatigue was obvious in her voice as well. “And… NOW!”

The etched submarine dropped and kept dropping even when a silver portal popped into existence around it. In moments, the steel vessel had vanished totally from view, taking several thousand gallons of Equestrian harbor water with it, then the portal abruptly quit as rapidly as it had formed. In a matter of minutes, the harbor was calm again without a single sign there had ever been a German submarine there, other than the awestruck young human child at the boat dock who was applauding and making celebratory whooping noises.

Both alicorns were panting like dogs and dripping with sweat, but Celestia had a dark grim smile of vicious triumph that scared Sherbert just a little.

“Where did it go?” asked Banana Pudding, her eyes still wide with astonishment.

“Front steps of the Reichstag,” said Sherbert. “I could see it through the portal. The words ‘dem deutschen Volke’ are written on the frieze. My mother took me there when we visited.”

“Gott in Himmel,” murmured Banana Pudding before giggling, sounding a little like she was not going to stop. “Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw? Oh curst effects of necessary law! How ill my fear they by my mercy scan, beware the fury of a patient man.” She fumbled out another cigarette, taking two attempts to light it before puffing away, still staring at the empty space in the harbor where the submarine had recently been.

“It’s by Dryden,” said Sherbert, casting a quick look at Princess Luna’s perplexed expression. “Something you missed during your… exile. Shall we adjourn to the Institute for now? Your Highness… Highnesses look like you need to sit down for a while and rest. And my mother will certainly want to meet with you.”

To Banana Pudding’s credit, she only screamed a little when ACACD introduced herself. Thankfully, there had been enough recent drama to dampen her mother-in-law’s reactions. Well, Guttman’s Scotch that Sherbert poured for her guests probably helped.

It took the whole bottle. Plus a second that Mane had saved back for Prime’s birthday.

The alicorns had much to talk about, and Mamma Nanna was quizzed extensively about Celestia’s young student who had apparently been pivotal in saving Princess Luna from the darkness of Nightmare Moon. When packets of paper sent by dragonfire magic from the European strike teams began materializing out of the ether in front of Celestia, Sherbert took it upon herself to stack them to one side so they would not interrupt the conversation. It would have been unscientific not to peek at their contents during the sorting, mostly to make sure the piles were roughly related to each other, but partially out of curiosity. Several of the more pertinent notes she placed on ACACD’s scanning device so her mother could read them, and quite a few went into the ‘special’ pile for later alicorn examination.

It occupied Sherbert’s time while waiting, continuing to work on the task while her overstressed mother-in-law curled up on the lab cot and went to sleep, and even later while the two alicorn sisters moved together into a huddle of sorts with just enough space for incoming dragon-mail to be snatched by Sherbert’s magic and placed where needed.

As research projects went, it kept her body busy and her mind occupied making a little list of German scientist names as various bits of their research passed by. Eventually, their time would come. None of them would threaten the foal that she held securely beneath her ribs, moving occasionally as Sherbert tried to keep calm and rational.

It was a long evening, and the flow of magical mail slowed to a trickle as dawn approached, leaving Sherbert in the middle of a sea of folders, notes, books, and other written materials which had appeared in bursts of dragonfire over the last few hours. Undoubtedly, there were dozens of intelligence specialists who would be poring over each page for years, but Sherbert was pleased enough to have gotten the first look. Then just as dawn began to light the sky outside, one last sheet of paper coalesced from smoke and fluttered down from above Celestia’s long horn.

She read it, of course, and smiled.

Being a scientist and a mother had some downsides.

The upsides were worth it.

To: Sherbert J. Lemon
Urgent:

Mission successful. All are well. Will be home soon.

Love,
Mane

11. Endless Roads to the Future

Equestria 1939 - Weird World War
Endless Roads to the Future

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”
— Winston Churchill, Speech to Harvard University, September 1943

“I think I have a cold, Nanna,” said Mane. “Maybe we should catch the next airship.”

“Mama’s got you.” Nanna produced a large kerchief and held it over her son’s nose. “Blow.”

“Mother!” The indignation was muffled, partially from his spouse laughing at his predicament, and also by his son alongside, raising his nose to get some attention from Granma Nanna also.

“No sharing germs,” chastised Sherbert, producing a large kerchief and holding it over her own son’s nose. “Blow like daddy, Sprocket.”

One perfunctory honk later from each of them, producing almost no snot, both mothers tucked away their respective kerchiefs and exchanged knowing looks.

“Are you two certain you want me along on this trip?” Banana Pudding asked for an uncounted time. “I mean my skillset is slanted to history and written lore. I can’t imagine what use I could be.”

“Mother, the items you will be examining are as dry and dusty as anything you have uncovered from some hidden tomb. Besides,” added Mane with a sideways glance at his wife, “since somepony invited herself on this trip, we will need a trusted foalsitter and bedtime story reader.”

There was a brief pause in the conversation where “It will be perfectly safe” was not said, broken when the griffon steward landed silently at the bottom of the boarding ramp where the unicorn family had been hesitating.

“Madames. Monsieur. Her Highness has settled into her suite, and we are finished boarding except for your party. If you would step this way, s'il te plaît.”

The family moved with the caution unicorns normally displayed around sharp drops and flying zeppelins, moving single file up into the belly of the Indomitable, a former warship of the neutral Griffon Emperor which had been converted to passenger service. It was a slower trip to Britain than taking an American flying boat, but it allowed a certain amount of ocean observation for the crew, and if it just so happened they spotted a German submarine on the surface…

Accidents do happen, after all.

Once they had been placed in the observation lounge with a few other scattered passengers, the steward departed on other tasks. Since the immobile (for the moment) Gusty was presently snoozing the morning away in Sherbert’s foal carrier, Mane encouraged Granma Nanna to entertain Sprocket while he had a few private words with his wife.

Straight to the point was the only way to get through to Sherbert, so he started with, “Are you going to tell me why you decided at the last minute to travel along with me to Britain on this mission?”

“Officially?” Sherbert tilted her head slightly. “Honeymoon.”

“And the real reason,” he continued.

“In case you get the urge to run again, I would prefer not to give you a head start. Also, your mother has been reluctant to visit us in Manehattan due to her ongoing… tensions with your father. This trip gives several months to a year of close contact with her son and grandfoals.”

Mane grunted, recognizing an argument that he could not win. It was still important to get in at least one point for the sake of his supposed position as the head of the family. “There may be terrible things ahead of us in Britain. The war is going poorly, the Soviets are covering the whole of the steppes with their blood, and the Americans are hard-put to fight in two different places at opposite ends of the world.” He hesitated before adding the painful words, “There is nopony I would rather face these terrible times with than you. Wait. That’s grammatically incorrect.”

“Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit,” recited Sherbert quietly. “These terrible times are powerful things, which we can turn into good. Together. Perhaps we can laugh about them later.”

“It is good to see you laugh.” Mane brushed away the strand of mane that kept falling into her face. “Hopefully, our life will continue to contain more laughter than tears.”

“And many diaper changes.” Sherbert sniffed and turned away. “I’ll take your mother to our cabin and get Gusty changed. You watch Sprocket. And no getting into trouble!”

“Who, us?” Mane brought his son over to the big window overlooking the rear of the zeppelin, checked to make sure he had not found a screwdriver somewhere, and stood quietly with him while Equestria grew smaller behind them.

A son. His brilliant young son who was making whole sentences while his peer group was still trying to eat the letters. It was quite a step for a spy to become a husband, working with a brilliant young mare who constantly pushed both of their limits. It was a far greater step to become a father, one who did not run away or punish his child for no reason, and Mane was determined to not screw these opportunities up.

“Where are we going when we reach Britain?” asked Sprocket out of the blue.

“Bletchley Park,” said Mane. “It is north of London.”

“That’s where Mister Turning works. Will we get to meet him? I find his letters amusing. The puzzles particularly.”

“Perhaps,” said Mane. “If you’re very good, and obey our rules.”

“I thought the first rule was ‘Don’t get caught?” asked Sprocket. The tiny foal thought fiercely, eventually adding, “So I should say I want to see where Peter Pan was written instead.”

“Correct,” said Mane, and his son nodded while still thinking.

“What will we do there? I mean what will we say we are doing there?”

“Mother will work as a secretary and I will tune pianos and sing,” said Mane

Sprocket looked in both directions, then lowered his small voice. “No spy stuff?”

“Not that we admit. So what do your parents do?”

“Daddy tunes pianoth and sings at parties, while Mama types all day,” said Sprocket in a much younger voice with a bit of a lisp. “What do your parents do? That’s a lot more interesting than mine. Did you want to play?”

“Very good.” Mane patted his son on the head, careful to not bump the stubby horn which still bore a few dark spots from his brief experiment with electrical plugs. “And your grandmother?”

“G’rama Banana lives in Canterlot and dusts statues. She knows lots of old stories. My other g’ramma died before I was borned.” The little unicorn thought some more. “Machine-grandma is sleeping until we get back, right?”

“Correct. Uncle Herman will be taking care of her fluid levels, and Uncle Prime promised to keep her safe. She needs a year or two of rest before we can turn the machine back on.”

“And someday she can’t get turned back on. I understand.”

Mane tousled his son’s mane. “You’re a very bright young colt, but I don’t think any of us really understand that.”

“No matter how much we learn, there’s always more.” Sprocket wrinkled up his nose. “More homework. Bleah.”

“Sometimes, homework is fun. It’s how I met your mother, after all.”

Father and son stood together in the observation lounge, watching the island of Equestria get smaller behind them until it was lost from sight. Then Sprocket spoke up.

“D’wana be a spy when I grow up. Wana be an astronaut.”

“You could be an astronaut spy,” suggested Mane.

“Nothing to spy on in space,” countered Sprocket.

Many years later, when the Thunderbolt 7 rocket lifted from Cape Canaveral with Admiral Sprocket’s Equestrian photoreconnaissance satellite on board, Mane was as proud as a father could be, with his wife right at his side..

Even though he could not tell anypony else about it.

It was the downside of being a spy.

The upsides of being a father were worth it.